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  • Secret Mysteries of the Sun Revealed

    Secret Mysteries of the Sun Revealed

    From New Dawn 113 (Mar-Apr 2009)

    From 1209-1249 one of the worst genocides in history was conducted against the Cathars, a heretical sect in southern France. Pope Innocent III, promising gold and indulgences (the remission of punishment due for sins) in exchange for the blood of the Cathars, sent 30,000 crusaders into France to massacre the Cathars and their supporters. 

    The Cathars were hunted, tortured, burned at the stake and savagely murdered by the Church’s hired killers. Estimates place the total number of Cathars and sympathisers murdered between 300,000 and 1,000,000 men, women and children. Throughout this bloodbath, an amazing phenomenon was witnessed. The Cathars did not express fear, anger or pain, but only bliss, despite the most horrendous atrocities committed against them. What were they on?

    According to William Henry in Mary Magdalene: The Illuminator, it was a psychoactive substance produced by the brain – the Cathars had learned the techniques necessary to produce it from the secret teachings of Jesus. It was called Christos (anointing oil) by the Essenes, who passed on their secrets to Jesus from Moses, who had obtained them in Egypt from descendants of the banished Atonite priests of Akhenaton.

    These teachings involve the power of the sun and the power of the spoken word and constitute what I call “the mysteries of the sun.” They were part of the Egyptian, Babylonian and Greek mysteries, and the Gnostic teachings of the early Christians and secret societies. They have been given to every culture by great adepts as means of enlightening the minds of the people and freeing them from the darkness of ignorance and superstition.

    In this article, I will briefly examine the life and teachings of the founders of various mystery schools in the Middle East and Mediterranean area from the Pharaoh Thutmose III to Omraam Mikhail Aivanhov. There were other mystery schools in India, China, Peru and elsewhere, but the ones I have chosen represent a continuity that spanned millennia and formed the spiritual roots of the Judeo-Christian heritage.

    The story of the mysteries of the sun is as old as mankind and as new as the latest scientific breakthrough. In 1882, Ignatius Donnelly published Atlantis: The Antediluvian World. In this book, he argued convincingly that Atlantis had established colonies in Peru, Egypt and elsewhere and that the mythologies and mysteries of these peoples represented the original religion of the Atlanteans, which was a form of sun worship.

    He wrote, “The religion of the Atlanteans, as Plato tells us, was pure and simple; they made no regular sacrifices but fruits and flowers; they worshipped the sun. In Peru a single deity was worshipped, and the sun, his most glorious work, was honoured as his representative. Quetzalcoatl, the founder of the Aztecs, condemned all sacrifice but that of fruits and flowers. [We can see how far the Aztec religion degenerated over the centuries to the low point of human sacrifice by the time of the Conquest.] The first religion of Egypt also was pure and simple; its sacrifices were fruits and flowers; temples were erected to the sun, Ra, throughout Egypt. In Peru the great festival of the sun was called Ra-mi.”

    Between pre-dynastic Egypt and the eighteenth dynasty, the “pure and simple” solar religion of Egypt became very corrupt and complicated. There were several sun gods and a whole host of minor gods. The priesthood was rich and powerful and the people depended on them for magic amulets, praying to the gods on their behalf and giving them a proper elaborate send-off into the afterlife. Fruits and flowers were no longer fitting sacrifices; animals took their place.

    Enter Pharaoh Thutmose III. A younger son of Amenhotep I, he owed his rule to the intervention of the priesthood of Amen-Ra who, in a religious ritual invoking the will of Amen-Ra, appointed him pharaoh, even though he was not in line for the succession. Thutmose realised that the priesthood was becoming too powerful and sought to curb their power by outwardly paying obeisance to Amen-­Ra, but secretly worshipping Aton and supporting a separate priesthood of Aton at Heliopolis who were loyal to the throne.

    Under his rule, Thutmose III permitted the common people to indulge in all their fanciful beliefs and superstition such as magic amulets. He believed that a gradual change in the existing religious beliefs could be more easily and permanently accomplished by establishing a secret mystery school, the students of which would put into practice higher standards. He wanted to gradually infuse into Egyptian religion from the top down those mysteries, myths and rites that would raise the people to a higher understanding and morality.

    Thus, in 1489 BCE he founded a secret mystery school, the Order of the Rose Cross, which the Rosicrucians claim descent from and which still exists today. Members of this mystery school were called the Therapeutea, meaning “physicians of the soul.” The sungazing Essene sect of Alexandria later adopted this name and the rosy-cross symbol.

    William Henry, in The Healing Sun Code, linked the rosy-cross and the Rosicrucian secrets with the “rising of the Healing Sun, the source of life and wisdom.” I recently talked to a woman who studied Egyptology for 25 years and knew about Thutmose III and the Rosicrucians. She told me that she once knew a Rosicrucian lady, who every time she felt ill would face the sun and do a special breathing exercise in which she would breath in the fire of the sun to burn impurities in her body. She lived to be very old. This technique was part of the secret teachings of the Rosicrucians, which they were very careful not to reveal to the uninitiated.

    Another technique used by Thutmose III and members of his order was the use of healing rods while sungazing (see Figure 1). These were copper and zinc tubes that contained hardened coal and magnetite respectively. They were reintroduced to the world by the Russian mystic Count Stefan Colonn Walewski, who was a member of a sungazing mystery school in the Caucasian Mountains. They amplify the current that passes through the body between the sun and earth while sungazing, enhancing meditation and quickening healing and the development of psychic powers.

    Thutmose III’s son and grandson continued with the mystery school and the cult of Aton, but it wasn’t until his great grandson, Akhenaton, took the throne that things came to a head.

    The Revolution of Akhenaton

    In 1369 BCE, Amenhotep IV took over the reigns of Egypt from his ailing father Amenhotep III. During his upbringing, he was educated at the Temple of the Sun at On (Heliopolis) where the priests instilled in him a devotion to Aton. When he became pharaoh, he was given the secret mysteries of the sun handed down from his great grandfather. He learned that Aton was the one true, self-created, unmanifest God and that most of the other gods, including Amen-Ra, were man-made. Early in his reign, he changed his name to Akhenaton, meaning “the servant of Aton.” Unlike his great grandfather, he had no tolerance for spiritual ignorance.

    Akhenaton initiated a change in the religious climate from a fear-based polytheism with its death cult, magic amulets, numerous idols, animal sacrifice, and secretive rituals of a powerful priesthood to a more devotional religion, which was free of graven images, obsession with the afterlife, and magic; which emphasised reverence for sunlight and cleanliness, and simple burial; and which allowed ordinary citizens to freely worship in open-air temples with offerings of fruits, flowers and incense, as was done in the original solar religion of Egypt. Aton’s temples had no idols or graven images other than the one Akhenaton devised – a sun disk from which proceeded rays, the ends of which terminated in graceful hands. Some of these hands held the ankh, the symbol of life, to the nostrils of his sungazing worshippers.

    This symbolism shows that Akhenaton understood the relationship between sunlight, prana and breath. He knew that sunlight is the source of all life upon earth. This was not worship of the physical sun but worship of one God, a supreme deity, whose spirit was in heaven and whose physical manifestation was the sun – the symbol of life. It changed the worship of the sun as a god to the worship of God symbolised by the sun. Paintings and carvings of Aton were always accompanied with a sort of hieroglyphic footnote (seen at the top of Figure 4, page 56), stating that it was just a representation of the All-encompassing Creator.

    Thus, Akhenaton established the first monotheistic religion by elevating Aton over Amen-Ra and other gods. His mother, Tiya, did much to mediate and stem the tide of controversy caused by his bold opposition to the powerful priesthood of Amen-Ra. However, after she died, he took the offensive and ordered his army to disband the priesthood and deface their false gods.

    Akhenaton loved to officiate at ceremonies as the high priest of Aton. The following quote from a decree made by Akhenaton upon the founding of his capital city, Akhetaton, shows that morning sungazing was a daily ritual of Atonism:

    “Every eye beholds him without hindrance while he fills the land with his rays and makes everyone to live. With seeing whom my eyes are satisfied daily when he rises in this temple and fills it with his own self by means of his rays, beauteous with love, and embraces me with them in life and power forever and ever.”

    During these ceremonies, Akhenaton and his congregation would sing his Hymn to Aton. Although the vast majority of Egyptians did not give much credence to Atonism, and Akhenaton’s court followed the rituals of the outer religion out of a sense of duty, there existed an inner circle of about 300 initiates who learned from Akhenaton the mysteries of the sun. Among these were Joseph the son of Jacob, who Robert Feather, in The Mystery of the Copper Scroll of Qumran, claims was Akhenaton’s vizier Nakhte.

    The Bible records that Joseph married Asenath the daughter of Potiphera, a priest of Aton in Heliopolis, and archaeologists discovered a private chapel to Aton in the ruins of Nakhte’s home in Akhetaton. Robert Feather thinks that after Akhenaton’s death, some of these initiates went to the sun temple of Heliopolis and others, including Joseph and his family, went to Elephantine Island in the land of Cush (Ethiopia), where they built another sun temple and established a branch of Judaism that exists to this day.

    The Mysteries Formed the Basis of the Judeo-Christian Tradition

    After the death of Akhenaton, the teachings of Atonism, its rituals and precepts, were almost completely destroyed by fanatics of the established religion. This has been the fate of every mystery teaching involving the sun in the past. Most historians and religious writers think that Akhenaton’s monotheism was a brief aberration in a long tradition of Egyptian polytheism and that it died with him.

    But, buried in the pages of historical and scriptural texts are hints that his ideas survived in the Jewish faith. For example, Psalm 104 is almost identical to the Hymn to Aton. They also survived in the secret teachings of the Essene and Therapeut Brotherhoods, which were associated with early Christianity.

    In the History of Egypt, the Egyptian priest Manetho wrote, “Moses, a son of the tribe of Levi, educated in Egypt and initiated at Heliopolis, became a High Priest of the Brotherhood… He was elected by the Hebrews as their chief and he adapted to the ideas of his people the science and philosophy which he had obtained in the Egyptian mysteries when he established a branch of the Egyptian Brotherhood in his country, from which descended the Essenes. The dogma of an ‘only God’, which he taught, was the Egyptian Brotherhood interpretation and teaching of the Pharaoh who established the first monotheistic religion known to man [Akhenaton]. The traditions he established in this manner were known completely to only a few of them, and were preserved in the mysteries of the secret societies, the Therapeutea of Egypt and the Essenes.”

    After returning from Heliopolis, Moses became an annoyance to the priests of Amen-Ra and the court of Ramses II because of his Atonistic ideas. The historian Josephus records that Moses was sent on a military expedition to Cush in an effort by Pharaoh’s courtiers to get rid of the “dissident.” There he not only found a wife but another outpost of Atonism on Elephantine Island. Robert Feather thinks that it was in the wilderness of Cush that Moses saw the burning bush and received his mission.

    Flavia Anderson, in The Ancient Secret: Fire from the Sun claimed that the burning bush was actually a small golden tree with a crystal that reflected sunlight so brightly that it appeared to be on fire. A similar talisman, called a punchao, was used by the Incas to put worshippers in a trance so that they could see and communicate with beings of light.

    Anderson also relates this golden tree to the Urim and Thummin (perfect light) of the Jews, which was a crystal set in a golden stand, and by which the high priest communicated with God. Anderson thinks that Moses encountered this golden tree during an initiation in the sun temple of Heliopolis. But it’s more likely that he saw it in the sun temple of Elephantine Island right before he returned to Egypt. It’s also likely that some of the Atonite priests who were descendants of Joseph and his family joined Moses in his mission. The Bible records that there were two rival factions of priests during the Exodus. One faction had Egyptian names such as Korah, Dathan, Abiram and On.

    In The Secret Initiation of Jesus at Qumran, Robert Feather shows how the descendants of these Egyptian priests, originally appointed at the time of Akhenaton, could have maintained their cohesion down to the beginning of the Qumran Essenes (610 BCE). When they entered Canaan, they settled around Shiloh and so became known as Shilonite priests. They became prominent around the time of Ezekial (589 BCE), Onias IV (160 BCE) and Jesus (4 BCE). These were also times when the Essenes were active. The Qumran Essenes, based on the Shilonite priests, came to have a much purer Judaism that rejected animal sacrifice, idols, amulets and burial with worldly goods which crept into the Judaism of the rest of the Israelites. During the Exodus, these priests were pro-Moses and against the priests of Aaron. It is likely that the priests of Aaron, who backslid into idolatry of the golden calf (the Egyptian goddess Hathor) while Moses was on the mountain, may have been responsible for reintroducing another Egyptian practice of holocaust sacrifice, prohibited by Atonism. On Mount Sinai, God gave Moses the first set of tablets to present to the Hebrews. Figure 2 (page 55) is a detail from a painting by Beccafumi. It shows Moses receiving the tablets from the sun, which is depicted as an opening in the sky.

    However, when he came down the mountain and saw how the people had lapsed into idolatry, he realised they weren’t ready for what was on the tablets. So he smashed the tablets and went back up the mountain where God engraved ten simple commandments on a second set of tablets.

    What could have been on the first set? Perhaps the solar mysteries! In any case, the mysteries were handed down by word of mouth from Moses to the Shilonite priests to the Essenes.

    Archeologists found in the catacombs of Rome a drawing of Jesus holding a rod of power when raising Lazarus from the dead (Figure 3, page 55), showing that early Christians understood that the source of Jesus’ power came from the sun. The Bible records that just before Jesus raised Lazarus, he “lifted up his eyes” to the sun and prayed. The rod is a symbol of the life force, which every Egyptian sun god and sun gods from Babylonia, India and Peru are shown wielding in paintings and wall carvings, such as in Figure 5.

    Many scholars are now coming around to the realisation that Jesus was a member of the Qumran Essene movement and that many of his teachings are similar to the Essene teachings. The Essenes and Therapeuts considered themselves to be the children of light and so did the early Christians.

    According to Gene Savoy in his book The Essaei Document: Secret Teachings of an Eternal Race, Jesus received the Essenes’ secret teachings, which he calls the paradosis, meaning a divinisation process by which one became immortal. Savoy hints at sungazing being a key factor in this secret teaching.

    He writes: “That the Essaei [Essenes] faced the sun at these times [sunrise and sunset] suggests that the sun was used as an intermediary by which men of the earth were linked by ‘cords of light’ with heaven… and were nurtured on a divine food upon which the angels fed…”

    The Therapeuts believed that pure souls returned to the sun and that sunlight indeed is the heavenly, incorruptible food of the soul.

    Savoy’s “cords of light” linking everyone can be thought of as an energy grid. The sun is one part of this energy grid; the earth is the other. Savoy wrote elsewhere: “The followers of Mithra gathered on the summits or stood in the waters, lifting their hands in prayer before the rising sun…” Savoy also mentioned in Project X that sun worshippers in Peru would stand on the summits of mountains or sun temples. This made me think of the vortices and ley lines of the earth grid, which are focal points and lines of electromagnetic energy usually found on high points on the earth’s surface and in stream beds.

    Richard Leviton and Robert Coons, in “Ley Lines and the Meaning of Adam,” a chapter from Anti-Gravity and the World Grid, claimed that the electromagnetic system of our bodies, the entire biosphere and the earth grid are part of a much larger solar system grid and it’s all connected. And the energy that powers this grid is the Light of God. They wrote, “The landscape temple made of stones and crystal… linked Heaven and Earth through Man. The terrestrial temple also functioned as a Grid Door by which human consciousness… could actually exit this plane and enter ‘the realm of the Gods’ [what William Henry called ‘the dimension of the blessed’]. Through this Grid Door, the Gods could also channel their spiritual vibrations and messages.”

    Perhaps that’s how God channelled the mysteries of the sun and then the Ten Commandments to Moses on the terrestrial temple of Mt. Sinai, as depicted in Figure 2. It’s significant that key events in Jesus’ ministry occurred on the peaks of mountains and in streams (his baptism, his last temptation, the sermon on the mount, his transfiguration, his death, and his ascension).

    Jesus passed on the Essene secret teachings on the mysteries of the sun to his disciples, including Mary Magdalene. The early Christians, who were not privy to these teachings, at first worshipped the spirit of Christ in the sun, but around the third century they lapsed into a personality cult of Jesus worship, which has continued to this day.

    Fragments of these secret teachings can be found in the Dead Sea scrolls, in the apocryphal text known as the Pistis Sophia, and in the Essene Gospel of Peace, which was hidden in the Vatican library for centuries before Edmond Bordeux Szekely discovered it in 1928. In the Pistis Sophia, an ancient gospel suppressed for over a thousand years and ignored by the orthodox churches even after its publication in the last century, Jesus, after his resurrection, elaborates on the solar mysteries and how necessary they are for entering the kingdom of heaven:

    “Ye are to seek after the mysteries of the Light, which purify the body of matter and make it into refined light exceedingly purified. Amen I say unto you… I have torn myself asunder and brought unto them all the mysteries of the Light, that I may purify them… else would no soul of the total race of men have been saved, and they would not be able to inherit the Kingdom of the Light…”

    How this purification occurs is hinted at in this further passage: “Now, therefore, he who shall receive the mysteries of the baptisms, then they becometh a great, exceedingly violent, wise fire and it burneth up the sins and entereth into the soul secretly and consumeth all the sins which the counterfeiting spirit hath made fast on to it.”

    In the Essene Gospel of Peace, Jesus gives a teaching on the purifying role of sunlight in this baptism of fire. He tells the sick after instructing them on fasting, “And if afterward there remain within you aught of your past sins and uncleanness, seek the angel of sunlight… For I tell you truly, holy is the angel of sunlight who cleans out all impurities and makes all evil-smelling things of a sweet odour. None may come before the face of God, whom the angel of sunlight lets not pass. Truly, all must be born again of the sun and of truth, for your body basks in the sunlight of the Earthly Mother, and your spirit basks in the sunlight of the truth of the Heavenly Father.”

    The receiving of this fire through sungazing with arms upraised in a Y formation or bent at the elbow and hands spread out and facing the sun was called by the Greeks “fire blooming” because the radiance or essence of the sun thus channelled burned away impurities in the solar plexus, which, by the way, is associated with the sun and with fire. One can find wall carvings, paintings, statues, woodcuts and photographs of sun worshippers from all over the world – Hindus, Muslims, American Indians, ancient Egyptians, Medieval monks, Russians, Incas, and even aborigines in prehistoric petroglyphs – all with upraised arms. William Henry wrote in Mary Magdalene: The Illuminator that when Jesus taught his disciples the Lord’s Prayer, he also taught them this prayer position, which he learned from the Egyptians, who called it the Ka position (Figure 6, page 57). Moses also learned it from the Egyptians and used it to invoke the Light of God during the Israelites’ battle with the Amalekites. Significantly, the battle was won at sunset.

    This leads us to consider another part of the mysteries revealed by the Pistis Sophia, which is a certain power of the spoken word. The soul, in order to be cut free from the counterfeit spirit, must utter “the mystery of the undoing of the seals and of all the bonds.” This is the science of the spoken word, the uttering of sacred mantras, prayers and songs that remove or restrain the evil self, the “karmic records” of the individual.

    These spiritual sciences and techniques were not revealed to all the faithful. According to the Pistis Sophia, the mysteries were to be given only to those initiates who proved themselves worthy through years of testing. They were also kept secret because of the threat of persecution.

    The Mysteries Survive Persecution During the Dark Ages

    In Lost Light, Alvin Boyd Kuhn wrote that sun worship “was the heart’s core of all religion and philosophy everywhere before the Dark Ages obscured the vision of truth… The dreadful shadows of the Dark Age will not end until the bright glow of the solar wisdom is released once more to enlighten benighted modernity.”

    During the Dark Ages, the mysteries of the sun survived and were passed down through the Knights Templar, Cathars, Paulicians, Bogomils and other Gnostics. Many of these saints were brutally murdered by the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches in an attempt to suppress their teachings, which threatened the Churches’ established authority.

    One of the most inspired Gnostics was Saul of Tarsus. Saul experienced a sudden conversion and gnosis on the way to Damascus. Paintings of this experience usually show Saul being blinded by the noonday sun shining through a break in the clouds directly upon him.

    Gene Savoy, in The Essaei Document, claimed that Saul had learned that the Essenes sungazed in order to communicate with God. When Saul tried it, he received a powerful, life-transforming message, which left him blind and temporarily insane so that he could not eat or drink for three days. In 1840, Dr. Gustav Fechner, the father of psychophysics, experimented with gazing at the sun through coloured filters and liquids. He did it at noon and, as a result, became blind and insane. However, after much prayer and meditation in a dark room, he recovered his sight and sanity and more. He began seeing auras and angels, whom he called “beings from the sun.”

    Socrates taught in his academy that personal transformation was only possible through understanding the word of God, the Light, and that it was attained only through inner illumination absorbed from the sun. Apparently, Saul the persecutor was transformed by the sun into Paul the proselytiser.

    Clement of Alexandria recorded that Paul, before going to Rome, said that he would bring to the brethren the Gnosis, or tradition of the hidden mysteries, as the fulfilment of the blessings of Christ, who, Clement says, reveals the secret knowledge and trains the Gnostic by mysteries, that is, revelations made in the state of higher consciousness. Such a state can be attained through deep meditation, chanting and sungazing. Unfortunately, Paul was arrested in Rome and a few years later executed. His true teachings on the mysteries of the sun were lost for several centuries until they were resurrected in Armenia and Syria during the late seventh century by the Paulicians. This group was so named because their teachings were the Gnostic mysteries handed down from St. Paul when he brought them to the Balkans and Syria during his ministry.

    The Paulicians were persecuted and diminished in the ninth century, although until relatively recently there existed an Armenian sun cult whose adherents were known as Arevorti, “children of the sun.” In the tenth century, a new Gnostic movement, the Bogomils, arose in Bulgaria, which carried many of the same beliefs and practices of the Paulicians, including sun worship. However, their teachings were based on the Gospel of John.

    At the beginning of the 12th century, Byzantium started to persecute the Bogomils. Many were killed, but some fled to Italy, southern France and elsewhere. By the middle of the 12th century, Gnostic schools like the Knights Templars and Cathars had sprung up and spread throughout Western Europe. These were the Western European counterparts of the Eastern European Bogomils.

    The Cathars “pure ones” and the Knights Templars were concentrated in the Languedoc and Midi regions of Southern France. The Cathars claimed to possess the Book of Love (AMOK) the original initiatory version of the Book of John (the only gospel the Cathars, Knights Templars and Bogomils read) which likely contained the solar mysteries. It taught that a spark or tiny sun of the Christ Light dwelt in man’s heart and it revealed how to nurture it like a seed of divinity so that it blossomed into the rose of the original rosy-cross mystery school. This teaching, which reputedly could transform a human into a divine being, once belonged to Thutmose III, Akhenaton, Moses, Solomon, Jesus, and John the Beloved. It was reputed to be able to dissolve all hatred, anger and jealousy from the hearts of men.

    The Cathars believed that the key to this divine transformation was the correct understanding of the symbolism of the Eucharist, that is, the bread and wine and the Holy Grail. The light of the sun is the bread; its warmth is the wine. The Holy Grail is the brain’s third ventricle or cavity containing the pineal and pituitary glands (Figure 7, page 58).

    This secret, known to the Cathars as the consolamentum (“with the sun in the mind”), was kept hidden from the uninitiated. The Cathars believed man entered the kingdom of God through his soul, the seat of which was considered by Descartes to be the pineal gland. The Cathars believed that the solar elements of the Eucharist transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ within themselves. The world transubstantiation comes from the Latin trans, across, and substantia, substance. This substance or glandular secretion, caught by the Holy Grail (the third ventricle), is what the Hindus call Amrita, “the elixir of immortality” and the Greeks called Ambrosia, “the nectar of the gods.”

    William Henry, in Mary Magdalene: The Illuminator, wrote, “All the occult mysteries speak of a key that is required to unlock mystical secrets of enlightenment. Specifically, the lost secret of the Templars… is about building a better human through the release of secretions from the astounding manufacturing plant of spiritual oils, the human brain. This oil or essence was the key secret of Mary Magdalene and the Essenes, recovered by the Templars from between the temples. The skull [specifically the third ventricle] is… the Cup of Life, the Grail, that catches these secretions from the brain… The Templars’ ultimate objective was to restore true Gnostic monotheism to the world, uniting Christianity, Judaism and Islam in a New Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. The ‘new’ humans that inhabited this New Jerusalem (or New Atlantis) would know and embody the secret of the Kingdom of Heaven within the brain and its capability of producing… the elixir of life, the Sacred Soma, the tonic of immortality, for these terms all refer to the cosmic essence or brain substance.” It was also called Christos (anointing oil) by the Essenes.

    Like their forerunners, the Bogomils, the Cathars engaged in chanting. This along with sungazing was the key to activating the pineal gland and producing the oil of Christos. The use of mantras and chanting can awaken the pineal because it sits above the mouth suspended in the third ventricle, a chamber filled with cerebrospinal fluid. Its location above the mouth in a fluid chamber makes the pineal gland quite uniquely positioned to respond to sonic vibrations. Manly P. Hall, in The Opening of the Third Eye, stated that the pineal gland “vibrating at a very high rate of speed, is the actual cause of true spiritual illumination.”

    The bliss that is experienced during sungazing and chanting is not just a natural high. According to William Henry, bliss is created by Christos and is a state of extreme happiness and freedom from attachment, conditioned responses and fear. It is the key required to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov said that only those who are happy and carefree like children can enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

    The teachings of the Cathars posed quite a threat to the fledgling Catholic Church. Unlike the Cathars, the Church of Rome clearly did not produce a substance that gave people an experience of divine bliss. And if it did, it would keep it from the people. That’s why the Church had to exterminate them.

    Fortunately, today we live in an age of spiritual freedom and anyone can teach and learn the science of the spoken word and techniques of sungazing presented by sun yogi Hira Ratan Manek and others. Although the light of the Cathars was snuffed out in the 13th century, at the beginning of the 20th century, the teachings of the Bogomils were revived by the master Peter Deunov and his chief disciple, Omraam Mikhail Aivanhov.

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    The Mysteries of the Sun Revealed

    On January 31, 1900, Mikhael Aivanhov was born into a poor family in Serbtzi, a small village of Macedonia. Throughout his childhood and adolescence, he was inspired by reading the Gospel of John, lives of the saints and books on yoga, which led him, at the age of fifteen, to an experience of illumination or samadhi.

    He went to the seashore to gaze at the sunrise. After meditating and sungazing for a little while, he sensed the presence of a heavenly being. Suddenly bathed in a cloud of brilliant light, he was plunged into a state of ecstasy. Later, he commented: “It was so beautiful that I was beside myself. To see such a being, with all those colours, all that light! He was almost invisible in the extraordinary luminosity that surrounded him. I found myself flooded with light. I was in a state of bliss, of ecstasy so immense, so powerful, that I no longer knew where I was. It was a delirious joy; it was heaven; it was the universe! Ever since then I have felt that if God were not all beauty I could not believe in him. It is beauty that remains in my mind as the one essential: neither power, nor knowledge, nor wealth, nor glory. Only beauty!”

    On the basis of his own spiritual experiences and of his reading of what he called the “Book of Nature,” he discovered the mysteries of the sun before being taught them by Peter Deunov. Mikhael and his master would go together to meditate in the pre-dawn stillness and watch the sun rise. Deunov also gave him the basic methods and exercises in mantra, prayer and sacred song: the mysteries of the spoken word.

    In 1959, he travelled to India, where he visited numerous ashrams and met several spiritual leaders. He was welcomed by several renowned Hindu sages as an accomplished master in his own right. One adept hailed him as a “solar rishi.” Another gave him his spiritual name, Omraam. One of the masters he met was the immortal bodhisattva, Babaji, who in 1992 and 1998 gave his blessings to another teacher of sungazing, sun yogi Hira Ratan Manek.

    Central to Omraam’s teaching is the concept of light. He saw in light the first emanation of the Divine, retaining the Divine’s qualities more than any other manifestation. As he insisted: “Light is a living spirit which comes from the sun and which establishes a direct relationship with our own spirit.” He explains how we can use light to transform ourselves and become radiant as the sun. In The Splendour of Tiphareth, he wrote, “Only the sun’s rays are capable of replacing all that is impure, worn out or obscure within you, and they can only do so if you learn to receive them. If you welcome them with your whole heart, they will begin their work of replacing the ‘old man’ in you, so that you will be wholly regenerated, renewed and resuscitated; your thoughts, feelings and acts will all be different. Only the sun’s rays are capable of working this transformation within you.”

    Omraam loved to talk about the Spirit of the sun. In this respect his philosophy coincided with the age-old mysteries of the sun, which taught that the true sun is not the star that is visible in the sky, but the invisible spiritual sun, the source of all life, light and love.

    He pointed out that, “On the physical, material level, the sun is the door, the link and the medium thanks to which we can make contact with the Lord… Through the sun, we work with God Himself. I can say that certain things that no human can teach me have been revealed to me by the sun. No book can give you what the sun gives you if you learn to have the proper relationship with him… If you want to create a bond between you [and the sun], you have to look at him in all consciousness. If you do that there will be a communication of vibrations between the sun and you in which forms and colours, a whole new world, will be born… The sun is an intelligence, a life, a living light. And when you understand that, all of a sudden he begins to speak to you… Try asking him a question and you will see that he will answer you.”

    Omraam died in 1986, but his teachings on the mysteries of the sun live on in numerous books. Over 90 books have been published in English, and there are enough notes from his hundreds of lectures to fill another 400 books. Of these books, the ones that are primarily concerned with the mysteries of the sun are The Splendour of Tiphareth: The Yoga of the Sun, Toward a Solar Civilization and Light is a Living Spirit. Louise-Marie Frenette’s newly-released biography of Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov, The Life of a Master in the West, has just been published in New Zealand by First Edition Press (to order call +64 (04) 586-1973). Today, his teachings and sungazing rituals are practiced by the I.D.E.A.L. Society, The Hearts Center and other spiritual communities around the world.

    The above article first appeared in World Explorer 37 Vol. 5 No. 1. 

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  • Enoch & the Watchers: The Real Story of Angels & Demons

    Enoch & the Watchers: The Real Story of Angels & Demons

    From New Dawn Special Issue 8 (Winter 2009)

    Every visible thing in the world is put under the charge of an angel. 
    – St Augustine

    In 2002 the British newspaper The Sunday Telegraph reported that the Vatican had banned the veneration of those angels who do not appear in the authorised texts of the Bible. This was an attempt to counter the influence of unnamed New Age groups who were allegedly recruiting new members within the Roman Catholic Church. In future, prayers were only to be directed to the three archangels Michael, Gabriel and Raphael who are mentioned in the Bible. According to the apocryphal and banned Book of Enoch these were the angelic beings responsible for binding the wicked fallen angels or Watchers who had transgressed God’s law. The news report said that the early Church had excluded the book, attributed to the Old Testament prophet and patriarch Enoch, from the authorised version of the Bible because it described these fallen angels and their activities.

    Who are the Watchers or fallen angels and why was the early Church and the modern Vatican so concerned about them?

    Genesis 6:1-4 says: “When men began to multiply on the face of the Earth, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and took them wives of all which they chose.” Traditionally the Ben Eloha or ‘sons of God’ numbered several hundred and they descended to Earth on Mount Harmon. Significantly this was a sacred place to both the Canaanites and the Hebrews who invaded their land. In later times shrines to the gods Baal, Zeus, Helios and Pan and the goddess Astarte were built on its slopes.

    These Ben Elohim or ‘fallen angels’ were also known as the Watchers, the Grigori and the Irin. In Jewish mythology the Grigori were originally a superior order of angels who dwelt in the highest heaven with God and resembled human beings in their appearance.1 The title ‘Watcher’ simply means ‘one who watches’, ‘those who watch’, ‘those who are awake’ or ‘those who do not sleep’. These titles reflect the unique relationship between the Watchers and the human race since ancient times.

    In the esoteric Luciferian tradition they were a special elite order of angelic beings created by God to be earthly shepherds of the first primitive humans. It was their task to observe and watch over the emerging human species and report back on their progress. However they were confined by the divine prime directive not to interfere in human evolution. Unfortunately they decided to ignore God’s command and defy his orders and become teachers to the human race, with unfortunate repercussions for both themselves and humanity.

    Most of the information we have about the Watchers and their activities comes from the apocryphal Book of Enoch. In the orthodox Bible the prophet Enoch, from the Hebrew ‘hanokh’ or instructor, is a mysterious figure. In Genesis 4:16-23 he is described as the son of Cain, the “first murderer,” and the first city built by his father is named after him. Further on in Genesis 5:18-19, and several generations later, Enoch is named as the son of Jared, and it is during his lifetime that the Watchers either arrive or incarnate in human bodies.

    In the apocryphal Book of Jubilee, allegedly dictated by “an angel of the Lord” to Moses on Mount Sinai when he also received the Ten Commandments, it says that Enoch was “the first among men that are born on Earth [sic] who learn writing, knowledge and wisdom.” It says that Enoch wrote down “the signs of Heaven” (the zodiac signs) according to their months in a book. This was so human beings would know the seasons of the years in relation to the order of the months and their respective stellar and planetary influences. The indication is that Enoch received this information from extraterrestrial angelic sources, i.e. the Watchers, and therefore he was a cultural exemplar.

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    The Fallen Angels Instruct Humanity

    Two hundred of the ‘fallen angels’ descended from the heavenly realm on to the summit of Mount Hermon and they were so smitten by the beauty of human women that, using their new material bodies, they had sex with them. This further incurred Yahweh’s wrath and, according to the Bible, the consequence of this miscegenation between the Fallen Ones and mortals led to the creation of half-angelic, half-human offspring (Genesis 6:4).

    These children were called the Nefelim or Nephilim and they were the giant race that once inhabited Old Earth. The fallen angels taught their wives and children a variety of new technological skills, magical knowledge and occult wisdom. This suggests that psychic abilities and magical powers were originally an ancient inheritance from the angelic realm given to early humans. In the Luciferian tradition this is known in spiritual and metaphorical terms as the ‘witch blood’, ‘elven blood’ or ‘faery blood’ that is possessed by witches and wizards.

    In the Book of Enoch it says that the leader of the fallen angels was called Azazel, and he is often identified with Lucifer (the Lightbringer) or Lumiel (‘the light of God’). He taught men to forge swords and make shields and breastplates (body armour). Azazel also taught them metallurgy and how to mine from the earth and use different metals. To the women he taught the art of making bracelets, ornaments, rings and necklaces from precious metals and stones. He also showed them how to ‘beautify their eyelids’ with kohl and the use of cosmetic tricks to attract and seduce the opposite sex. From these practices Enoch says there came much ‘godlessness’ and men and women committed fornication, were led astray and became corrupt in their ways.

    This was the basis for the early Church condemning the fallen angels for teaching women to make necklaces from pieces of gold and bracelets for their arms. St Paul said that women should cover their head in the synagogue (Corinthians: 11:5-6). This was because the fallen angels were supposed to be attracted to human females with long flowing hair. The custom of women covering their hair in churches is still found in Roman Catholicism and also in the customs of Islam.

    The fallen angel Shemyaza, another form of Azazel, is said by Enoch to have taught humans the use of root cuttings and the magical art of enchantment; the fallen angel Armaros taught the resolving (banishing) of enchantments; Baraqijal taught astrology; Kokabiel, the knowledge of the constellations (astronomy); Chazaqiel, the knowledge of the clouds and the sky (weather lore and divination); Shamsiel, the signs of the sun (the solar mysteries); Sariel the courses of the moon (the lunar cycles used in horticulture and agriculture and the esoteric lunar mysteries); Penemuel instructed humans in the art of writing and reading; and Kashdejan taught the diagnosis and healing of diseases and the science of medicine.

    It is obvious from these descriptions of the teaching abilities of the Watchers that they were cultural exemplars and the bringers of civilisation to the early human race. It is therefore strange that in orthodox Judeo-Christian religious texts they are misrepresented as evil corrupters of humanity.

    Some idea of the original exalted status and real nature of the ‘sons of God’ and ‘the angels of the Lord’ can be found hidden in the ancient annals of angelic lore. For instance, Kokabiel is described as “a great angelic prince who rules over the stars.”2 In the Sibylline Oracles, Araqiel is one of the fallen angels who guides the souls of the dead to judgement in the underworld.

    Shamsiel, possible originally a Babylonian sun god, was called “the prince of Paradise” because he was one of the guardian angels who watched over the gates to Eden. In this role he took Moses to see the heavenly garden and he also watched over the treasures of King David and his son Solomon the Wise. This reference may be to spiritual treasures rather than physical gold and jewels. In the Jewish Zohar he is named as the chief aide-de-camp to the mighty Archangel Uriel and bore his standard into battle.

    Sariel was an angel associated with fertility of the earth and the spring equinox (northern hemisphere) in March. He governed the martial zodiac sign of Aries the Ram and was invoked for protection against the malefic power of the Evil Eye.

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    Azazel – Lucifer – Lumiel

    Azazel, the leader of the Watchers, as mentioned before, was identified with Lucifer or Lumiel. In the Quran it is said that Lucifer-Lumiel (Iblis) rebelled against Allah because he was told to bow down and worship the clay-born “man of earth” Adam and refused. He was forced to fight a battle in Heaven with the Archangel Mikael or Michael and his Army of the Lord. As a result Lumiel and his rebel angels were cast out of Heaven and fell down to Earth. Here Lumiel became the “Lord of the World” and in Christian mythology he was falsely identified with the bogeyman Satan. However, esoterically in the Luciferian tradition, Lumiel or Lumial is not an evil satanic figure luring humankind into temptation and acts of evil as the Church represents him. He is “the angel of God [who] rebelled against the static, established cosmic order and set in motion the forces of change and evolution…”3

    It is possible that Lumiel may have originated in Canaan as Shahar, the god of the morning star (Venus). He had a twin called Shalem, who was also symbolised by the planet Venus, but as the evening star. These divine bright and dark twins represented the solar light emerging from the darkness of night at dawn and descending into it at dusk. They were the children of the goddess Asherah, and there is archaeological evidence from the Middle East that the Hebrews adopted her worship when they settled in Canaan and practised it alongside reverence of the tribal storm god Yahweh. The Old Testament has several references to the continued worship of Asherah as “Queen of Heaven” by the allegedly monotheistic Hebrews. This took place at shrines in sacred groves on hills where they made offerings of cakes and incense to the goddess. In Canaanite mythology, Shahar, as the Lord of the Morning Star, was cast down from heaven for defying the high god El in the form of a lightning bolt. In that form he fertilised Mother Earth with his divine phallic force.

    Azazel is represented as a metal-smith and a fire-working sorcerer or magician. He has also been compared to the biblical first smith Tubal-Cain, a descendant of the half-human, half-angelic “first murderer” Cain. The actual name Azazel has variously been translated as ‘god of victory’, ‘the strength of God’, ‘the strong god’ and even ‘the goat god’. In the apocryphal Apocalypse of Abraham, he is called “the lord of heathens” suggesting he was originally a pagan god. He has also been identified with the serpent in the Edenic myth that seduced the first woman and “Mother of All Living,” Eve. In a Persian text known as the Urm al-Khibab or The Primordial Book, dating from the 8th century CE, the angel Azazil or Azazel is said to have refused to acknowledge the superiority of Adam over the angels. As a result Allah expelled him and his rebel angels from the heavenly realm to live on Earth. More generally in Islamic lore Azazel or Azrael is the angel of death and he acts as a guide for the souls of the dead.

    In Leviticus 16:8-10 and in the Dead Sea Scrolls a curious Hebrew ritual is recorded that features Azazel as the name for the ‘scapegoat’ that takes on the communal sins of Israel. It says that the high priest Aaron took two goats from the flock and cast lots (practised divination) to choose which one would be the scapegoat and sacrificed as a “sin offering.” The Scrolls say that the high priest confessed all the “impurities of the children of Israel” over the head of the Azazel goat. By this ritually symbolic act he transferred to the unfortunate animal all their guilt and sins so they could be absolved of them. The goat was then either cast out into the wilderness to die or thrown over a cliff to be dashed to pieces on the rocks below.

    This ancient and archetypal concept of the scapegoat sacrificed for the sins of the human race and abandoned in the wilderness is a powerful and potent motif that appears several times in biblical myths. It can be seen in the story of Cain who becomes an exiled wanderer on the Earth after being marked by God and banished “east of Eden” after killing his brother Abel. In one Jewish legend the wise King Solomon, a powerful magician who could summon and control demons, fell from grace because he “whored after foreign gods.” He was forced by God to leave Jerusalem and wander in the desert disguised as a beggar.

    Also after their exodus from slavery in Egypt, Moses and the Israelites were forced to spend forty years wandering in the desert before they were allowed to enter the Promised Land (Canaan). In Ancient Egyptian mythology, the dark god Set is represented as a divine outcast who dwells in the desert and, after she left Adam, his first wife Lilith or Liliya fled to the wilderness away from human habitation. In the New Testament Jesus wandered in the wilderness for forty days and nights. He was not accepted as a teacher in his own town of Nazareth and was rejected as the promised messiah by his people. When Jesus was crucified he symbolically took on the role of the sacrificial scapegoat who dies to cleanse the sins of the human race.

    It is possible that the account of the ritual of the goat-god Azazel may have been an autumn equinox or harvest rite of Syrian, Hittite or Canaanite origin adopted by the Hebrews. Originally a goat would have been selected by means of a divination ritual and then offered to a desert god or demon that had to be placated by the shedding of blood. Eventually the sacrifice was made to Yahweh as a petition to forgive the sins of his followers. Azazel was popularly believed to have a retinue of hairy he-goat demons known as the se’irim who, like the Watchers, lusted after human women. It cannot be a total coincidence that the Church imagined the Devil or Satan in the form of a hairy half-human he-goat with a massive erect phallus who had sexual intercourse with his female worshippers at the Witches Sabbath.

    Shemyaza is seen by some modern Luciferians as either the emissary of Lumiel or one of his avatars (an incarnated divine being in human form). He not only fell in love with human women, but also with the Babylonian deity Ishtar, the goddess of love and war. She promised to have sex with him if he would in return reveal to her the secret name of God. When Shemyaza told her, Ishtar used this forbidden knowledge to ascend to the stars and she reigned over the constellation of Pleiades or the Seven Sisters. While the other Watchers were rounded up by the archangels and punished by God, Shemyaza voluntarily repented his error and sentenced himself to hang upside down in the constellation of Orion the Hunter, with whom he is sometimes identified in the Luciferian tradition. In the Qabalistic tradition, Naamah, the sister of the biblical first smith Tubal-Cain, seduced Azazel and she has been associated with Ishtar.4

    “A race between Gods and men”

    As we have seen, the end result of the illicit relationships between the Watchers and “the daughters of men” was, according to Judeo-Christian propaganda, the spawning of a monstrous race of warlike, blood-drinking cannibalistic giants called the Nephilim. Genesis 6:4 less dramatically describes them as “the mighty men of old, men of renown.” At first they were fed manna (ambrosia or the food of the Gods?) by Yahweh to stop them consuming human flesh, but they rejected it. They slaughtered animals for food instead and then began to hunt down and eat human prey.

    It has been speculated that this legend is based on the culinary habits of the nomadic desert herdsmen in the Middle East, who were voracious meat-eaters. In the biblical myth of Cain and Abel the dispute between the two brothers that led to the first murder is over the nature of the offerings made to Yahweh. Abel, a “keeper of sheep” or nomadic herdsman offered the “firstlings of the flock…” and Cain, who was “a tiller of the ground” or farmer-gardener offered “the fruit of the ground” (Genesis 4:2-4). Abel’s burnt offerings of animal flesh and blood were pleasing to Yahweh, but he rejected the vegetables, cereal and fruit offered by his brother. On a purely material level, as opposed to a mythic and spiritual metaphor, this story may reflect the struggle for dominance between nomadic herdsmen and the early farmers of the Neolithic Age in the Middle East.

    The idea of semi-divine heroes was born from the ancient myths of unions between the Gods and mortals. The poet and writer Pindor (518-438 BCE) described the heroes of the past as “a race between Gods and men.” In the Dead Sea Scrolls the terrible human-eating Nephilim are in fact described as the guardians of arcane knowledge who “knew all the mysteries of nature and science.” There are also oblique references to the breeding techniques they taught that suggest they instructed early humans in the domestication and rearing of animals.

    Additional references also hint at experiments that led to the creation of ‘monsters’ by the interbreeding of animals with different and unrelated species. In modern theosophical occultism there are legends about the lost continent of Atlantis that claim its scientists bred half-human, half-animal hybrids as a slave race. In our own time scientists are experimenting with genetic research and animal cloning experiments. It is widely rumoured that in China there have recently been abortive attempts to create a new half-human, half-animal hybrid species. These unnatural experiments led to the cataclysmic disaster that destroyed Atlantis. This also relates to the destruction of the Nephilim and the early human race in the biblical Flood. Records of such an event can also be found in the mythology of ancient peoples worldwide and especially among the Babylonians in the Middle East. In fact, it is claimed that the story of Noah and the Flood in the Old Testament originated in Babylonian and Sumerian myths.

    10,000 BCE and the End of the Ice Age

    It is known that around 10,000 BCE there seems to have been a cultural explosion that transformed early humankind. At the end of the last Ice Age the first signs of agriculture appeared in the Middle East with a shift from a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle to that of settled farming. This marked the beginning of civilisation in this area. As early as 9500 BCE barley, wheat and rye were being cultivated and oats, peas and lentils were being grown by our Neolithic ancestors in what is now modern Kurdistan, between Turkey and Iraq. At the same time dogs, goats and sheep were also domesticated. Within a thousand years copper and lead smelting was being practised in Anatolia (modern Turkey) and archaeologists believe this process was first discovered in Kurdistan, along with weaving and pottery making. The ancient Kurdish culture was also the first to develop a script and was one of the earliest literate societies in the Middle East.

    The Kurds claim to be the descendants of the ‘Children of the Djinn’ (spirits), the offspring of a mating between the djinns and mortal women. In some parts of Kurdistan, especially among the sect of Yezedis, who worship the Peacock Angel (Azazel, the leader of the fallen angels), can be found tall, fair-haired people with blue eyes. Although anthropologists believe they may be of ancient European ancestry, popular folk belief among the Kurds says they are descendants of the ‘Children of the Djinn’, who in ancient times brought civilisation to early humankind.

    In general the ancient Middle East was known as ‘the cradle of civilisation’ with the earliest city-states being founded in the Mesopotamian area (modern Iraq and Iran). The early indigenous people of the region, the Sumerians and Akkadians, developed the first written language, studied astronomy and created libraries. The Babylonians and Assyrians followed them and in the mythology of all these races are stories of how the Gods descended to Earth and taught them the arts of civilisation.

    In the Book of Enoch it says that when Yahweh saw the lawlessness, chaos, corruption and sexual immorality that had been caused by the interaction of the Watchers and humans he decided to intervene through the agency of the archangels Michael, Raphael, Gabriel and Uriel. He commanded Raphael to bind Azazel hand and foot like a sacrificial goat and cast him into a deep ravine in the desert. Gabriel was sent on a divine mission to destroy “the bastards and reprobates” and “the children of the Watchers amongst men.”5 The Archangel Michael, the commander of the Army of God, was sent to arrest Shemyaza and bind him “under the earth” until Judgement Day. As we have seen, the fallen angel repented his sins and sentenced himself to cosmic exile among the stars.

    The Book of Jubilee says that the archangels bound the Watchers “in the depths of the earth” and in Judaic lore they are imprisoned in a mysterious “second Heaven.” However, it is also said that some of these “mighty warriors” have a special place reserved for them in Sheol, the Jewish underworld. There they are said to lie in state “with shield and spear intact.”

    Christian O’Brien has suggested6 there is a connection between the biblical Watchers and the semi-divine, semi-mythical Tuatha De Danann (Children of the goddess Dana). This race of ancient magicians descended to Earth on the sacred hill of Tara in prehistoric Ireland. With the coming of Christianity, the Tuatha De Danann was banished into the ‘hollow hills’ and became the Sidhe (Shee) or ‘Shining Ones’, the elves and faeries of Irish folklore. There has always been a strong belief among the peasantry in Ireland that the Good People or faeries were originally the fallen angels who sided with Lucifer in the Battle of Heaven.

    In this article we have constantly referred to the Watchers as angelic beings with a spiritual form who incarnated in physical bodies to have sexual relations with mortal women. In recent years a considerable amount of speculative literature has been published suggesting that instead they were of earthly origin. Popular best-selling authors such as Andrew Collins,7 Graham Hancock and Ian Lawson have claimed that the biblical myth of the Watchers represents memories of a primeval ‘elder race’ of super-humans belonging to a lost civilisation who taught their technology to more primitive people. Lawson has claimed that this (unknown) ancient race may have been spiritually advanced souls who incarnated to help early humankind and were corrupted by them in the process. Collins has also recently launched a new project to investigate the magical aspects of the legend.

    Symbolism of the Myth of the Fallen Angels

    What is the esoteric significance behind the myth of the fallen angels, the expulsion of Lucifer from Heaven and the Fall of Man as represented by the Garden of Eden saga? In the Bible Lucifer is often depicted in the reptilian form of a dragon or serpent and in the West this creature is symbolic of evil and the powers of chaos. Babylonian, Hittite, Canaanite, Iranian, Egyptian, Greek and Norse myths all describe in various forms a struggle between a supreme father-god, representing cosmic order and harmony, and a younger rebellious god who challenges and tries to overthrow divine authority. Although these conflicts usually take place in a pre-human epoch, they are also sometimes depicted as occurring in world history and are often connected with the creation and early development of the human species and the rise of ancient civilisations.

    Symbolically, Lucifer or Lumiel is known as the Lord of Light as he is the first-born of creation. He represents the active cosmic energy of the universe and has been identified with fire, light, phallic power, independent thought, consciousness, progress, liberty and independence. The founder of the modern Theosophical Society, Madame Helena Blavatsky, described the Lightbringer as “the spirit of intellectual enlightenment and the freedom of thought” without whose influence humanity would be “no better than animals.”8

    In the Bible Lucifer (or Satan as he is mistakenly called) is often depicted in reptilian form as either a dragon or a serpent. In Western mythologies this creature is commonly misrepresented as a symbol of the powers of darkness, chaos and evil. In contrast, in Eastern mythology the dragon is a good omen representing fertility and good fortune. Lumiel-Lucifer is often identified with the serpent in the Edenic myth described in Genesis. In the Luciferian tradition, the biblical serpent is regarded as the personification of knowledge, wisdom and enlightenment who liberated the first humans from the spiritual ignorance imposed on them by Yahweh. The serpent is seen as the symbol of an outside liberating force that quite literally opened the eyes of Adam and Eve to the reality of the created universe and the wonders of the material world.

    The snake, serpent or dragon is an ancient mythical and archetypal image of the solar phallic power or life force that is associated with Lucifer and the explosion of light following the divine celestial event that created the universe (known by modern scientists as the Big Bang). When the first man and woman ate the forbidden fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the astral or heavenly garden, they became consciously aware. Their first realisation was that their physical ‘cloaks of flesh’ were naked. They rushed to cover their genitals as they had become aware of the so-called ‘serpent power’ or kundalini that can be raised by sexual intercourse and non-reproductive sex acts. They also ate from the Tree of Life which initiated the cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth and of human souls incarnating in physical form.

    Interestingly, the anthropologist and shamanic teacher Dr. Michael Harner has described an experience he had in the jungle of the Peruvian Amazon after partaking of the hallucinogenic vine ayahuasca. He had a vision of a dragon-prowed ship with a crew of bird-headed humans. He then encountered an ancient race of reptilian entities that he believes exist within each human being in the brain stem at the base of the skull and the top of the spinal column. These reptilian life forms told Dr. Harner they had arrived on Earth aeons ago from the stars. Allegedly, they created life here so they had somewhere to hide and were the true masters of the planet. The anthropologist mentioned this to an old Indian shaman and he said he knew about these entities and called them the “Masters of the Outer Darkness.”9

    The myth of the Watchers, the Fall of Lucifer and the Fall of Man all represent the primeval Dreamtime or ‘Golden Age’ of cosmic and earthy harmony and primal innocence that may have existed on the material plane or on some kind of astral or pre-material plane. It is the symbolic or actual physical destruction of this heavenly or earthly paradise, where humans and animals lived together and communicated by a universal language, which is reflected in such myths and legends. In shamanic terms it is known as the Great Separation when humans no longer knew or understood the language of the animals. It was also a time when humans began to communicate together in different languages and this is represented by the biblical story of the Tower of Babel.

    The myth of the Golden Age or Paradise on Earth is closely linked with the fall of Lucifer from Heaven and the diminishing of his former status as the first-born of creation to become the Lord of the World. On a symbolic and metaphorical level, as well as a physical one, it is also connected to the separation of humans from nature and their natural environment that is manifesting in our modern times. It was the deliberate intervention of Lucifer and the fallen angels in human evolution, rather than any defiance of cosmic authority, which ultimately lead to their fall from heavenly grace. The Watchers’ only ‘crime’ was that they wanted to help the progress of their human flock. However, the refusal of Lucifer-Iblis to recognise the creation of human beings means that the Fall from heavenly grace was inevitable.

    In the Luciferian tradition Lumiel is promised redemption and the restoration of his former status in the cosmic plan. This can only come to pass when the human race spiritually evolves. So it is to the benefit of Lumiel and his teaching angels to help us achieve that end. The relationship between humanity and the leader of the Fallen Ones is therefore very much a symbiotic one, as they need each other.

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    Footnotes

    1. G.A. Davidson, Dictionary of Angels, The Free Press, USA, 1971, p. 127.

    2. Ibid, p.164.

    3. Dr. Stephen Flowers, Fire and Ice, Llewellyn, USA, 1990, pp.43-44.

    4. Michael Howard and Nigel Jackson, The Pillars of Tubal Cain, Capall Bann, UK, 2000 and 2003, p.65; Michael Howard, The Book of Fallen Angels, Capall Bann, UK, 2004.

    5. R.H. Charles, The Book of Enoch, Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, UK, 1912, p.37.

    6. Christian O’Brien, The Genius of the Few, Daintus, UK, 1985.

    7. Andrew Collins, From the Ashes of Angels, Michael Joseph, UK, 1996; Andrew Collins, The Gods of Eden, Headline, UK, 1998.

    8. Helena Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine Vol: II, Theosophical Society, India, 1921, p. 171, 255, 539.

    9. Dr. Michael Harner, The Way of the Shaman, Harper & Row, USA, 1980

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  • Searching for the Dawn & Demise of Ancient Civilisation

    Searching for the Dawn & Demise of Ancient Civilisation

    From New Dawn Special Issue 8 (June 2009)

    When and where did civilisation begin? How far back in time does high culture go? Indeed, what do we mean by such terms as civilisation, or sophisticated and high culture?

    When I was in college, more years ago than I perhaps care to remember, I learned the standard story which still holds sway in many circles: Civilisation and high culture date back to, at most, perhaps five or six thousand years ago. A handy marker for recognising a true civilisation was written language, and it was generally agreed that the earliest true writing could be dated to the late fourth millennium BCE (that is, circa 3500 to 3000 BCE).

    The Sumerians are generally credited with developing writing about 3300 to 3200 BCE, although the earliest Egyptian hieroglyphics may date back to the same period, or even a century or so earlier, and there is also evidence of writing possibly from as far back as 3500 BCE found at Harappa, the Indus Civilisation, in what is now modern Pakistan.1

    But then there are reports of much earlier possible writing from Henan Province, China, dated to 6600 to 6200 BCE, inscribed on tortoise shells.2 I recollect a book I read while still an undergraduate, The Roots of Civilization by Alexander Marshack, which argued that various lines, notches, and “scratchings” on ancient bone artefacts dating to 10,000 BCE and earlier, before the end of the last Ice Age, were in fact symbolic systems, including lunar calendar notations. Maybe our ancestors were not so primitive and stupid after all.

    Maybe defining civilisation and high culture in terms of a written language (or more accurately our knowledge of a recorded language; we can easily miss things in the archaeological record) simply is not a fruitful approach. This is the conclusion I have come to while pursuing my own research.

    Re-Dating the Great Sphinx of Egypt

    I first came to the problem of the origin of civilisation through my studies of the Great Sphinx of Giza, Egypt. Combining a Ph.D. in geology and geophysics from Yale University (1983) with a lifelong enthusiasm for ancient cultures, on my first trip to Egypt in 1990 I was primed to take a careful look at the Sphinx.

    As I have recounted elsewhere,3 my colleague and friend John Anthony West had suggested to me various silly notions that the Great Sphinx might be older than the standard Egyptological attribution of circa 2500 BCE. I figured that through a careful analysis of the geology, I could show the error in such thinking. Surely all those professional Egyptologists could not be wrong. It turns out they were.

    Based on my geological and seismic analyses, utilising the weathering and erosion patterns correlated with the palaeoclimatology and subsurface features,4 I concluded that the oldest portions of the Great Sphinx date back to at least the period of 7000 BCE to 5000 BCE, and perhaps back to 9000 BCE or earlier. To oversimplify a bit, the core body of the Great Sphinx shows features that place it well back before the onset of the current arid regime (the Giza Plateau is on the edge of the Sahara Desert) some 5,000 years ago.

    Such a conclusion has deep implications, suggesting that high culture and civilisation dates back much earlier than previously believed. I have been told on more than one occasion that my conclusions cannot be true because if they are, then “history must be rewritten.” Certainly, we cannot have that, can we? Vested interests run high, and I have been attacked from many sides, both by orthodox Egyptologists and historians, and by various people not as closely associated with mainstream academia.

    Through it all over the last two decades, I have looked at the alternative theories suggested to explain the data, and I continue to maintain that the evidence clearly points to the origins of the Great Sphinx being much older than 2500 BCE. Indeed, the attacks and criticisms, forcing me to carefully scrutinise and enlarge my dataset, have served only to reaffirm my conclusions.

    The Sphinx Under Water, or Under Fire?

    Recently my work on the Great Sphinx has come under fire from a self-described anti-Establishmentarian. Given the number of people who have been asking me about this latest “Sphinx theory,” I feel it is imperative that I briefly address it here.

    Robert Temple5 has proposed a moat theory (that is, the Sphinx Enclosure was purposefully filled with water such that the body of the Sphinx was submerged and sat as a statue in a small artificial lake) to explain the clear signs of water weathering and erosion on the body of the Great Sphinx and on the walls of the Sphinx Enclosure.

    Temple contends that the moat theory explains the data adequately without hypothesising that the Great Sphinx dates back to a much earlier period during which there was more rainfall than at present. (Here I will not address his hypotheses, which I do not find persuasive, that the Sphinx was the jackal [wild dog] Anubis and the face seen on the Sphinx is that of the Middle Kingdom pharaoh Amenemhet II, though I would point out that the original Sphinx has been reworked and the head has been re-carved, perhaps more than once.)

    The body of the Sphinx, carved from the bedrock, sits largely below ground level, and various moat, pool, or artificial fountain hypotheses have been suggested for the Sphinx from time to time. I considered such notions carefully as far back as my early analyses of the geology of the Sphinx, starting in 1990. In summary, such moat and related theories do not hold water (to use a bad pun) and are not compatible with the features of the actual Great Sphinx, the Sphinx Enclosure, and the general geology and palaeohydrology of the Giza Plateau.

    Scrutinising the Sphinx

    While in Egypt recently (March 2009) I made it a point to look at the Great Sphinx and Sphinx Enclosure with fresh eyes to see if there could be anything to the moat class of theories. I will summarise briefly a half dozen points.6

    1) Based on my observations and analyses, the Sphinx Temple (built out of blocks removed from the Sphinx Enclosure when the body of the Sphinx was initially carved) and the so-called Valley Temple to the south of the Sphinx Temple show clear signs of heavy precipitation-induced weathering on the limestone core blocks. These limestone temples were subsequently refurbished with Aswan granite ashlars during the Old Kingdom (as evidenced by an Old Kingdom inscription still found on a block located at the Valley Temple). The moat theory cannot explain the nature of the very ancient weathering seen under the Old Kingdom granite veneer.

    2) There is much heavier surface erosion on the western end of the Sphinx Enclosure, and the surface erosion tapers off dramatically toward the eastern end of the enclosure. This is exactly what is to be expected based on the palaeohydrology of the Giza Plateau and is incompatible with a moat theory where it is hypothesised that water was brought in from the Nile to the east. Furthermore, the nature of the surface erosion throughout the enclosure and on the body of the Sphinx is as expected if there were water running over or raining down on the rock layers. The erosion actually observed is not compatible with pooled water in the enclosure.

    3) The highest levels of the middle member strata, as seen in the Sphinx Enclosure on the western end, are most severely eroded, which is compatible with the agency of precipitation. If the moat theory were true, then the lower strata on the eastern end of the Sphinx Enclosure would be most heavily eroded (caused by water being brought in via canals from the Nile), but the opposite is seen in reality.

    4) The subsurface seismic data demonstrating the depth of weathering below the floor of the Sphinx Enclosure, based on my analyses (using areas excavated during the Old Kingdom for comparison), even when calibrated very conservatively, gives an age of initial carving for the core body of the Great Sphinx of at least 5000 BCE. More than one geological colleague has suggested to me that a more realistic calibration gives a date thousands of years earlier. And no, standing water in the Sphinx Enclosure would not accelerate the depth of weathering below the floor of the enclosure.

    5) The vertical fissures observed in the walls of the Sphinx Enclosure show diagnostic signs of having been formed by precipitation and water runoff. In my opinion, they do not show any characteristics that are diagnostic or even suggestive of having been formed by artificial dredging of the Sphinx Enclosure, as some have suggested.

    6) If the Great Sphinx actually had sat in an artificial pool or lake, either the water level around the Sphinx would have had to have been the same as that of the surrounding water table, or the walls and floor of the pool in which the Sphinx sat would have had to have been sealed up and watertight (and any artificial walls, such as on the eastern end, would have had to have been strong enough to withstand the pressure of the water). Clearly, the ancient water table was well below the level of the floor of the Sphinx Enclosure (or else the Sphinx Temple, for instance, would have been flooded). The Sphinx Enclosure, if simply carved from the bedrock (as all the evidence suggests) would not have held a deep pool of standing water. The bedrock in the enclosure is highly faulted, and characterised by a karst morphology that would leak like a sieve (another bad pun, perhaps). The enclosure would have had to have been fully sealed up (with some kind of mortar or cement, perhaps), and there is no evidence of such sealing. Furthermore, if the enclosure had been sealed in such a manner, this would not be compatible with the dredging theory for the vertical fissures mentioned in the previous point. I would also note that the chambers and tunnels under the Great Sphinx would have been flooded from above if the Great Sphinx had been sitting in a pool of water, unless the Sphinx Enclosure had been watertight; yet the evidence suggests the enclosure was not watertight.

    Could the Sphinx be Hundreds of Thousands of Years Old?

    Even as my re-dating of the Great Sphinx has been attacked as impossible by some authorities, other serious researchers have suggested that I have underestimated the true age of the oldest portions of the Great Sphinx by a factor of ten or more!

    For instance, two members of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Vjacheslav I. Manichev and Alexander G. Parkhomenko,7 citing my work, have reinterpreted the geology and erosional features on the Great Sphinx to mean that the core body of the statue could date back as far as 800,000 years ago. And they are not referring to simply a natural outcropping that may have existed 800,000 years ago that was later shaped into a statue. (Remember, too, that to carve the core body of the Sphinx huge multi-ton blocks were removed from the Sphinx Enclosure and assembled as the Sphinx Temple, so the original Sphinx Temple is as old as the core body of the Great Sphinx).

    The dating of Manichev and Parkhomenko could push the age of the Great Sphinx into a very remote time period, one that has been suggested for possible, but ambiguous, ancient structures, sculptures, or simulacra that are found in many parts of the world, such as Markawasi in Peru,8 the Romanian Sphinx,9 or a possible stone circle dubbed Adam’s Calendar by researchers Johan Heine and Michael Tellinger with a claimed date of 75,000 years ago.10 Personally, I am not convinced that the Great Sphinx is anywhere close to the age postulated by Manichev and Parkhomenko, or that various claimed very ancient, very eroded statues are anything more than natural formations, but the prospects are intriguing. Without going off on such limbs, there is clear evidence for early high culture at a remote period beyond just that of the Great Sphinx.

    Nabta Playa

    In the Sahara Desert of southern Egypt, west of Aswan, is an area known as Nabta Playa. Here an ancient stone calendar circle, as well as many other megalithic erections and structures, was identified by archaeologist Fred Wendorf (Southern Methodist University) and his team and dated to circa 4000 BCE and earlier.11 

    Thomas Brophy12 has carried out extensive analyses of Nabta. According to Brophy, three stones inside the Nabta calendar circle represent the belt of Orion (just as the three pyramids of Giza represent the belt of Orion according the research of Robert Bauval13). The stones on the Playa and the corresponding stars in the sky aligned on summer solstice nights between about 6400 BCE and 4900 BCE. Brophy found even more correlations, however. Three other stones in the Nabta calendar circle correspond to the configuration of Orion’s head and shoulders as they appeared in circa 16,500 BCE, about half a precessional cycle earlier than the previously mentioned alignment. Based on these and other analyses of monoliths in the area, Brophy concludes that the early inhabitants of Nabta Playa possessed incredibly sophisticated knowledge, the type of knowledge we associate with high culture and civilisation. Furthermore, the dates of the Nabta structures are in line with my dating of the oldest portions of the Great Sphinx, and at both Giza and Nabta the constellation of Orion (which represented the god Osiris during dynastic times) was of prime importance.

    Göbekli Tepe

    If the dating of the Great Sphinx remains controversial (after all, old ideas die hard), and the analyses of Nabta Playa are questionable in the eyes of some researchers, there is one site that even the most ensconced conventional archaeologists cannot ignore.

    In modern Turkey, just north of the border with Syria, is a site known as Göbekli Tepe that has yielded dozens of carved limestone megaliths, many of which date back to the extraordinarily early period of 9000 BCE to 10,000 BCE.14 Klaus Schmidt, of the German Archaeological Institute, has been heading an excavation team there since 1994, and there is no doubt as to the importance, authenticity, and dating (based in part on radiocarbon) of Göbekli Tepe. This is a discovery made by mainstream academics.

    Göbekli Tepe boggles the imagination on many accounts. The date is incredibly early, even earlier than my “conservative” estimate for the date of the Great Sphinx. Göbekli Tepe dates back to the end of the last Ice Age. The monolithic megaliths are in the range of two to seven metres high (the latter is the height of an unfinished megalith left where it was being quarried). Sculpted onto the surfaces of the monoliths are a variety of animals, including snakes, boars, foxes, vultures, spiders, scorpions, a centipede, and a three-dimensional figure that has been interpreted as a lion. The megaliths excavated thus far had been erected into four distinct stone circles, ranging from ten to thirty metres in diameter. Based on geophysical surveys, the entire site may cover three dozen hectares (about 90 acres) and contains another twenty or so stone circles.

    Although very different from the Great Sphinx and the Sphinx Temple, in my estimation, taking the entire Göbekli Tepe site as a whole into account, just as much effort, social organisation, and sophisticated or high culture must have been required to construct the Göbekli Tepe complex as the Sphinx complex. When I first presented my findings on the age of the Great Sphinx, I was told over and over again by mainstream archaeologists and historians that my dating was simply impossible because it was well known that nothing so elaborate and sophisticated, requiring an advanced level of social organisation, could occur so early. Göbekli Tepe proves these assertions false and helps place the Great Sphinx in a larger context.

    The work at Göbekli Tepe has literally just begun. Most of the site has yet to be excavated and who can predict what surprises might be in store for us? Who were the people that built the site, and why did they build it? So far there is no evidence that the site was inhabited; no living areas have been excavated, though the thousands of animal bones found (the most common animal represented is the aurochs, a type of extinct ox) are evidence of feasting at the site. Was it a holy, sacred site? An area for religious pilgrimages? Or perhaps an ancient centre of knowledge? My instinct is that the positions of the monoliths, and the specific carvings on their surfaces, probably encode information… but what? And what happened to the people who built and used Göbekli Tepe? Curiously, the site did not simply fall into disuse and gradually decay. It was intentionally buried somewhere around 8000 BCE. Why? The mystery only deepens.

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    The Origin and Demise of Early High Culture

    There has been space here to mention only a few examples of archaeological sites that challenge the conventional view of when high culture, advanced knowledge, and civilisation arose. Admittedly, I have dwelt on those that most interest me, including the Great Sphinx with which I have become entwined. Put all the evidence together and there is no doubt in my mind that what we can term high culture existed at least 11,000 years ago (and possibly much earlier).

    Where did early civilisation originate? And what happened to it? Is there a lost primordial ancient civilisation, one that was destroyed in some cataclysmic natural catastrophe? Could the legend of Atlantis have some truth to it? These are questions I have pondered long and hard for many years.

    Being a geologist, I view Earth and our environment as unstable, full of unexpected surprises, at least over the long term. Climates change, sea levels rise and fall, volcanoes erupt, earthquakes rock the land and sea, and objects fall from the sky. I have discussed how such natural cataclysms may have influenced the history of ancient civilisations,15 and in particular I have pointed out that Earth has experienced a series of encounters with comets during historical and prehistoric times.16

    Depending on the severity of the encounter (size of the comet, whether it actually touched the surface of Earth or perhaps resulted in a mid-atmosphere explosion, and so forth), dramatic climatic changes could be affected on Earth, which in turn could affect sea levels, and weather extremes can wreck havoc on animal and human populations, causing famines.17

    In 2003 I suggested that the end of the last Ice Age may have been brought about in part by comets bombarding Earth,18 and this hypothesis has received dramatic support with physical evidence for an impact around 10,900 BCE.19 There is also evidence for impacts around 7600 BCE, 4400 BCE, 3150 BCE, 2345 BCE, 1628 BCE, 1159 BCE, 207 BCE, 536 CE, and 1178 CE.20 

    Bottom line, based on all the evidence, there is no doubt in my mind that these incidents, these cosmic catastrophes, had a profound influence on ancient civilisations. In some cases migrations were sparked, in other cases entire cultures may have been wiped out.

    At the end of the last Ice Age, from before around 18,000 BCE to perhaps 11,000 BCE or later (dates at such a far remove are approximate), when sea levels were significantly lower (by seventy-five to a hundred and twenty metres), a sub-continental expanse of land was exposed in Southeast Asia where there is now only water in the area bounded by Indochina, the Malay Archipelago, the islands of Indonesia, and Borneo. To geologists this drowned region is known as Sundaland, and there is a variety of evidence that here an early civilisation was located; they fled as the waters rose and the comets came down.21 Could this be the primordial lost civilisation that so many of us suspect once existed?

    And what about that intentional burial of the structures at Göbekli Tepe? Did they see their fate in the skies? As the comets rained down did those ancient builders do their best to cover and preserve that which they had so carefully created, perhaps hoping to return one day to uncover their monuments? Or did they leave them for us to recover?

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    FOOTNOTES

    1. David Whitehouse, “‘Earliest Writing’ Found”, BBC News Online, 4 May 1999; John Nobel Wilford, “Who Began Writing? Many Theories, Few Answers”, The New York Times on the Web, Science, 6 April 1999.

    2. Paul Rincon, “‘Earliest Writing’ found in China”, BBC Science.

    3. Robert M. Schoch with Robert Aquinas McNally, Voices of the Rocks: A Scientist Looks at Catastrophes and Ancient Civilizations, New York: Harmony Books, 1999.

    4. Robert M. Schoch, “Redating the Great Sphinx of Giza”, KMT, A Modern Journal of Ancient Egypt, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 52-59, 66-70 (Summer 1992); Robert M. Schoch with Robert Aquinas McNally, Voyages of the Pyramid Builders: The True Origins of the Pyramids from Lost Egypt to Ancient America, New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2003; Robert M. Schoch & Robert Aquinas McNally, Pyramid Quest: Secrets of the Great Pyramid and the Dawn of Civilization, New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2005; T.L. Dobecki & R.M. Schoch, “Seismic Investigations in the Vicinity of the Great Sphinx of Giza, Egypt”, Geoarchaeology, vol. 7, no. 6, pp. 527-544 (1992); Robert M. Schoch, “Life with the Great Sphinx: Some Personal Reflections”, Darklore, vol. 1, pp. 38-55, 291 (2007).

    5. Robert Temple, “What was the Sphinx?”, New Dawn, no. 112, pp. 47-52 (January-February 2009); Robert Temple with Olivia Temple, The Sphinx Mystery: The Forgotten Origins of the Sanctuary of Anubis, Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 2009.

    6. For more details pertaining to some of these points, as well as various comments on the criticisms of K. Lal Gauri and his colleagues as cited by Temple with Temple [2009], see Robert M. Schoch, “Geological Evidence Pertaining to the Age of the Great Sphinx”, in New Scenarios on the Evolution of the Solar System and Consequences on History of Earth and Man (Eds. Emilio Spedicato and Adalberto Notarpietro), 2002. Proceedings of the Conference, Milano and Bergamo, June 7-9th, 1999, Università degli Studi di Bergamo, Quaderni del Dipartmento di Matematica, Statistica, Informatica ed Applicazion, Serie Miscellanea, Anno 2002, N. 3, pp. 171-203.

    7. Vjacheslav I. Manichev & Alexander G. Parkhomenko, “Geological Aspect of the Problem of Dating the Great Egyptian Sphinx Construction”, in Geoarchaeology and Archaeomineralogy (Eds. R. I. Kostov, B. Gaydarska, and M. Gurova) 2008. Proceedings of the International Conference, 29-30 October 2008, Sofia, Publishing House, “St. Ivan Rilski”, Sofia, pp.308-311.

    8. Robert M. Schoch, “Introduction”, in Markawasi: Peru’s Inexplicable Stone Forest (Ed. and Author, Kathy Doore, with a foreword by Peter E. Schneider), Surprise, Arizona: Kathy Doore, 2006, pp. 14-20.

    9. Anonymous, “THE BUCEGI – Sphinx,” article dated 10 October 2002 and posted at: www.ici.ro/romania/en/turism/c_sfinx.html. Accessed 4 April 2009.

    10. Angelique Serrao, “‘Oldest Man-Made Structure’ Unearthed”, Article dated 14 July 2008 and posted at: www.iol.co.za/index.php?from=rss_South%20Africa&set_id=1&click_id=13&art_id=vn20080714062546858C113827. Accessed 4 April 2009.

    11. J. McKim Malville, “Oldest Astronomical Megalith Alignment Discovered in Southern Egypt by Science Team”, Press release dated 31 March 1998 and posted at: www.colorado.edu/news/releases/1998/101.html. Accessed 5 April 2009.

    12. Thomas G. Brophy, The Origin Map: Discovery of a Prehistoric, Megalithic, Astrophysical Map and Sculpture of the Universe (Foreword by Robert M. Schoch and Afterword by John Anthony West), New York: Writers Club Press (iUniverse), 2002; Mark H. Gaffney, “The Astronomers of Nabta Playa: New Discoveries Reveal Astonishing Pre-Historic Knowledge”, Atlantis Rising, no. 56, pp. 42-43, 68-70 (March/April 2006).

    13. Robert Bauval & Adrian Gilbert, The Orion Mystery: Unlocking the Secrets of the Pyramids, New York: Crown Trade Paperbacks, 1994.

    14. Graham Chandler (photographs by Ergun Çağatay), “The Beginning of the End for Hunter-Gatherers”, Saudi ARAMCO World, vol. 60, no. 2, pp. 2-9 (March/April 2009); Andrew Curry (photographs by Berthold Steinhilber), “The World’s First Temple? Predating Stonehenge by 6,000 years, Turkey’s Stunning Gobekli Tepe Upends the Conventional View of the Rise of Civilization”, Smithsonian, vol. 39, no. 8, pp. 54-58, 60 (November 2008).

    15. Schoch with McNally, 1999.

    16. Schoch with McNally, 2003.

    17. For a discussion of the effects of a sixth century CE cometary event, see Ker Than, “Comet smashes triggered ancient famine”, New Scientist, issue 2689, p.9 (7 January 2009).

    18. Schoch with McNally, 2003.

    19. R.B. Firestone, A. West, J.P. Kennett, L. Becker, T.E. Bunch, Z.S. Revay, P.H. Schultz, T. Belgya, D.J. Kennett, J.M. Erlandson, O.J. Dickenson, A.C. Goodyear, R.S. Harris, G.A. Howard, J.B. Kloosterman, P. Lechler, P.A. Mayewski, J. Montgomery, R. Poreda, T. Darrah, S.S. Que Hee, A.R. Smith, A. Stich, W. Topping, J.H. Wittke, and W.S. Wolbach, “Evidence for an extraterrestrial impact 12,900 years ago that contributed to the megafaunal extinctions and the Younger Dryas cooling”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 104, no. 41, pp. 16016-16021 (9 October 2007).

    20. Schoch with McNally, 2003; Undoubtedly this list is incomplete, especially for the period between 10,900 BCE and 3150 BCE.

    21. Schoch with McNally, 2003.

    © New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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  • The Lost City of Angkor Wat & the Mysteries of a Great Asian Civilisation

    The Lost City of Angkor Wat & the Mysteries of a Great Asian Civilisation

    From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 6 No 1 (Feb 2012)

    Angkor Wat is a vast stone temple at the heart of an ancient stone city. But at the ends of its corridors and the centres of its hidden rooms lie surprising Buddhist shrines still active in a place abandoned for hundreds of years. These Buddhist statues are imposters, hasty late additions to a religious building constructed to accommodate the myths and rituals of Hinduism.

    They are splendid still, some draped incongruously in new and garish orange robes, the polyester glowing harsh against the cool, old stone. They are alive, thriving on the centuries of mystical memory that make Angkor Wat one of the most fascinating and mysterious places on Earth. Among these ancient religious ruins there still exists a living, beating heart of spirituality that has survived almost 1,000 years. Imagine the incredible spiritual power that exists in such a place.

    These days the revered King of Cambodia, for whose ancestors the ancient temples at Angkor were built, lives in his official residence right in the centre of Phnom Penh, the capital city of Cambodia. I often wonder if he thinks about what it would be like to live at that other place. Angkor Wat would be uninhabitable, of course, for any modern head of state. But its presence must play in the king’s heart and mind, reminding him that his was one of the greatest of the lost civilisations, and now still the largest standing stone religious structure in the world.

    Angkor Wat was built over a 30 year period beginning in 1113. It was a royal palace, temple and eventually tomb for a god-king and the hundreds of women who attended him. The five famous lotus-bud towers still rise above the flattened landscape so characteristic of Cambodia, the central one containing the holiest of shrines once attended only by the King himself.

    Though it was lost to the world for centuries, rumours of this great complex would pop up occasionally in Europe, principally in the accounts of Spanish and particularly Portuguese Catholic missionaries who would periodically stumble upon the place. Of course, when you go to Angkor Wat now you are more likely to see hundreds of Chinese and Korean tourists on package holidays. It is more than compensating for its centuries of obscurity.

    It has tantalised the popular imagination, periodically slipping from the collective memory, only to be discovered and celebrated over again. Angkor Wat was once again “rediscovered” by the West in 1860 by French Protestant naturalist Henri Mouhot, who became its great publicist and created a vogue for Cambodia and for Angkor in particular. This rediscovery very nearly destroyed it by creating a market for the exquisite sculpture that was littered all through the jungle which covered the complex.

    Writers and aristocratic travellers like Somerset Maugham and the eccentric Sitwells travelled to Angkor in the 1930s, 40s and 50s. Maugham thought that everyone should see Angkor once before they die. They were charmed by Angkor Wat and its surrounding reservoirs and canals. It reminded them of an oriental version of the Palace at Versailles, though it far surpassed Versailles in scale.

    The temple has been plundered over the centuries, and much of its best statuary is now in collections all over the world, as well as in places like the National Museum of Cambodia – an astounding institution – probably one of the best in the world – in an exquisitely designed building. The grounds of the museum also house a University of Fine Arts and a College of Traditional Performing Arts. It is in this museum that you will see the best sculpture of the Angkor period. Cambodian religious art is simply the best in the world, the refined and beautiful Buddha heads becoming such iconic items that they are reproduced now in cement and resin and found in gardens and on coffee tables across the world. To come face to face with them in their original stone glory is really quite exceptional.

    Angkor Wat was not constructed as a Buddhist temple. It represents an extraordinary moment in religious history where an ancient civilisation shifted from Hinduism to Mahayana Buddhism and later to the more deliberately primitive form of Theravada Buddhism, which it continues to practise today.

    The King & His Wives

    The stone temples at Angkor are covered with intricate carvings of women. The dancing, flying and singing angels called apsaras and the more substantial and sensuous goddesses or devadattas. They look out at you from every wall and from every column. Kent Davis, writing in the recent book To Cambodia With Love (Andy Brouwer ed.), claims that there are 1,850 women carved into the stone at Angkor Wat alone, making them the real subject of the temple, crowding out the image and idea of Vishnu, to whom the place is meant to be dedicated. For Angkor was a city of women. The temples were allowed to house only women, apart from the god-king himself.

    He had hundreds of wives, plus attendants and staff and the sacred court musicians and dancers. He was also attended by an all-female bodyguard, a picturesque police force that made quite an impression when he paraded amongst his people outside the temple walls, standing on the back of an elephant. It is said that these carvings are in fact portraits of the very women who lived here, and certainly each is different and quite unique. They are imbued with clothing and jewellery and attitudes that are quite individual. And the faces are still quite recognisably those of the women you meet outside on the streets of 21st century Siem Reap. It’s the most extraordinary communication across the centuries.

    The King and his women walked through these galleries and cloisters, attending to a particular religious cult that was said to be the very purpose of the Khmer people. During the Angkorian empire – when this place was the centre of a vast city of over a million people – the Kingdom extended its rule over huge areas of south-east Asia, over the whole of the Mekong Delta, Laos, Burma, Thailand and Malaysia. What’s so eerie about Angkor Wat now is that it stands alone, with none of the immense wooden city which once surrounded it. All we have left are the stone cloisters, galleries and temples that served the empire’s religious purpose. There is no record anymore of the places where people actually lived and pursued their everyday lives. Just constant, monolithic stone structures dedicated to a purely religious purpose.

    And into these structures are carved religious iconography, and out of it are carved the most sensuous and alive statues – Garudas, Bodhisattvas, the Naga. This Naga, the snake king, was the special protector of the Angkorian empire, and his hooded, cobra-like image, bearing seven, nine or eleven heads, is still there in the antique stone, emerging at the end of stairways on balustrades, looming up at the visitor in an attitude both threatening and majestic. Each evening the King of Angkor had to ascend to the temple at the summit of the complex and spend the night with his only true wife, the Queen of Serpents. This is the central tower of Angkor Wat, with a well 120 feet deep, its bottom scattered with sacred golden objects. He was locked into the holiest of shrines each night of his life to consummate this supernatural relationship. If the Queen of Serpents were not to appear, the King was doomed to die the next day. And if the King didn’t appear then the Khmer kingdom would be destroyed and the world would end.

    This was the mythology of the Khmer people, and the reason behind their great stone city. They saw themselves as the creators of humanity, and the keepers of humanity’s secrets. The continued existence of the whole world, they believed, relied on the religious duties of the Khmer King. This mythology continues even into the present day, with a real conviction amongst the Khmer people that whoever could build Angkor Wat must still be possessed of extraordinary talents. This conviction has fed into some of the more unfortunate moments of recent Cambodian history, with the genocidal butcher Pol Pot employing this imagery to justify his savagery and his lunatic ambitions.

    The holy ground surrounding the ancient and mysterious (and fundamentally Hindu) Angkor Wat has been colonised by the more modern Buddhists, recognising the special significance of this amazing place. Indeed, almost from the day it was deserted as the centre of royal power, the city of Angkor became a place of pilgrimage for the Buddhists of Cambodia, though century by century it fell into further disrepair.

    These days in the surrounding areas you can have your palm read, make offerings to Buddhist monks and have the special blessed red thread tied around your wrists, and all of these activities have an especial significance on the hallowed ground of Angkor. Wizened old women performed the thread-tying ceremony on me and my partner, and these threads stayed around our wrists for almost a year, something we took as an auspicious and remarkable sign – they normally only last for a month or two. Attesting as well to Angkor Wat’s Hindu heritage is the presence of shrines to the sacred cow at various points around the city. These shrines are still recognised as holy by the local people, though they have no real understanding of why this is so, and Cambodian Buddhist culture has no taboos surrounding the eating of cows.

    The Amazing Construction of the Temple

    So who built the place? The king Suryavarman the 2nd built Angkor Wat as a Hindu temple dedicated to Vishnu, in a recreation of the mythical Holy Mountain of Meru. He was said to be the descendant of an intrepid Hindu family that had managed to conquer vast swathes of Asia. This included the island of Java, where a relative built the extraordinary temple of Borobudur, another evocation of Mount Meru, though on far less grand a scale than Angkor. The glory of the Angkor Wat period was short lived. Having been completed in 1150, it was sacked by the sister Hindu Kingdom of Cham – in modern-day Central Vietnam – in 1177. In the nineteenth century, when Henri Mouhot asked the locals how it was built they were as mystified about its origins as he was. They suggested that it was self-created, somehow emerging entirely perfect from the jungle floor. At this point in history the Cambodian people had forgotten the greatness of their empire. Some others thought that it had been created through magical intervention – that such a feat of construction was impossible given the technology of the time.

    Maverick historian Graham Hancock believes the temples mirror the constellation Draco as it would have been seen some 12,000 years ago, so that they in fact map out an even more ancient – and perhaps even extraterrestrial – set of astronomical records. Many have hinted that Angkor contains wisdom that is Atlantean in its origins. The lost civilisation archetype is at its most powerful in this place because it provides such solid and inexplicable evidence of technology, sophistication and architectural complexity seemingly out of its time. It is no accident that it calls to so many people from across the world. Angkor is a point of power, and to be amongst it is to feel a connection that cannot be described or defined.

    Others still wondered if it was constructed by a prehistoric race of giants who embodied the perfection of the Khmer nation. This last theory still has some currency today, with one of my smart young university-educated friends in Phnom Penh confessing to me that he was sure the Khmer had once been giants. Giants and demons make up the balustrades of the stone bridges in Angkor, representing the act of the churning of the ocean of milk, the fundamental creation myth of Hinduism, and a central idea behind the architecture of Angkor Wat.

    The temples are surrounded by still-functioning reservoirs, artificial lakes and ornamental pools. These served, not a practical purpose as the earliest French archaeologists supposed, but a religious and symbolic purpose. Australian Cambodia expert Milton Osborne explains it best in his book The Mekong: “Symbolically, the water that surrounded the temples represented the ‘seas’ of the Hindu universe, just as the towers of the temples were evocations of Mount Meru, the sacred mountain at the centre of the universe.” Such incredible complexity exists in this antique cityscape. The average tourist is almost entirely unaware of the sacred intent of the ground on which they wander.

    As might be expected in such an ancient, mysterious and palpably spiritual place, there is much talk of prophecies found etched in the stones of Angkor. Monks and magicians are all privy to these tales, all of which hinge on the destruction of Cambodia and the eventual return to power of the Khmer on the global stage. The prophecies are quite spooky in their prescience, though perhaps they speak more to the agony of a powerless and impoverished nation destroyed by war and internal conflict. Certainly they are shared at drunken gatherings of men all over Cambodia. It is written in Angkor, they say – one day we shall be great again.

    The man who restored the Angkorian empire to greatness was Jayavarman the 7th, descendent of the man who constructed Angkor Wat. He led Cambodia during its very brief period in the sun and remains a great hero to the Cambodian people, the epitome of the God-King. He is so much still revered that they are making a new movie about him featuring Khmer martial arts and a muscular movie star playing the king. The real truth is probably Jayavarman the 7th was a recluse who rarely left his Temple at Bayon and was said to have leprosy. Nonetheless he seems to have been a strong and capable leader and he got rid of the invading Chams in 1181.

    That’s when he built the enigmatic Bayon Temple, which has his own face carved into dozens of towers scattered at random around the temple. The King rendered himself, not just as the supreme ruler and representative of the Godhead, but also as the Bodhisattva Lokesvara, thereby combining in his person the multiple religious currents of the Khmer. There is something, as well, supremely human in these heads, so perfectly recreated throughout the complex. The full lips and plump cheeks are beautiful, and speak of gentleness rather than fear, of contemplation rather than exertion. I am always delighted to be in the presence of this enormous cosmic friend, no matter how many hundred elderly Korean ladies might be pushing past me in the hot sun. That is the connection between the ruler and his people – perhaps all people. We respond to majesty, and recognise its presence and its guiding hand, even across the division of ages.

    After he died in 1218 the Khmer Empire began its slow and sad decline, from which it is only now beginning to rescue itself. From the 17th century the Khmer empire began to spiral downward, ceding vast amounts of territory to Thailand and Vietnam – including the whole of what we now know as Southern Vietnam, including the city of Saigon, which the Khmer called Prey Nakor (and still do, if you ask them). In 1865 Cambodia became a French protectorate.

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    The Legacy of the Khmer Empire

    The Khmer empire is responsible for so much of what we recognise as south-east Asian culture – including many of the things we normally attribute to Thailand, such as Thai boxing, Thai dancing, even the Thai script is derived from Khmer, which was itself derived from Sanskrit. The traditional story of the Ramayana – though considerably changed in its Cambodian version – is carved on kilometres of stone panels in Angkor Wat, said to contain eighteen to twenty thousand carved figures. The women of the temple spent much of their time re-creating the stories in sacred dance. This dance has survived, quite miraculously, through its continuous royal patronage, and these days is performed once again on the terraces of the temples of Angkor.

    Cambodia is still a very poor place. It has suffered the effects of war and the disastrous Khmer Rouge years. Angkor Wat is its jewel, glorious and majestic still, and the Khmer people are justly proud of it. In our enthusiasm for this ancient site it’s important that we not glamorise the poverty that still blights the nation or, more subtle still, spiritualise it. The Cambodian people struggle to exist, and it’s a country of immense poverty and injustice. But there exists as well a great continued interest in the traditional arts, the arts that you can see being practiced on the 900 year-old carved stones of Angkor.

    And Angkor Wat is no longer the centre of political power in modern Cambodia. The capital city is Phnom Penh, 315 kilometres to the south-east. Interestingly enough, Phnom Penh has its own spiritual and mystical roots in Angkor. The city was said to have been founded by an elderly woman who, scavenging for firewood in the debris washed up by a recent flood, split a log and found in its hollow five religious statues – four stone Buddhas and one bronze Vishnu. They had come from Angkor, magically transported in the floodwaters. The woman, called Penh, decided to have them enshrined on a hill (Phnom in Khmer) on her property around 1372. Around this grew the city of Phnom Penh, eventually the new heart of the Khmer kingdom. But at its very centre remains the spiritual energy of Angkor.

    The temples of the Angkor area are still alive as points of worship and pilgrimage. They have seen such a strange shift over the centuries – as Hindu temples, then Mahayana Buddhist temples, then Theravada Buddhist temples, and finally as shrines to the tourist dollar. They will survive this, too, and their stones will continue to speak to people a thousand years after we have gone.

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  • When Does the Kali Yuga End?

    When Does the Kali Yuga End?

    From New Dawn 138 (May-June 2013)

    The widespread belief that an age is ending and a new one dawning is part of a cyclical concept of time common to most philosophical cultures. The best known versions are the Four Ages of Greek mythology and the Hindu myth of the Four Yugas. The purpose of this article is to clarify some of the confusion that exists around them, to set out the actual figures as given by Eastern and Western authorities, and to discourage unthinking acceptance of a currently popular theory.1

    The earliest European source of the myth is Hesiod, a Greek poet of the eighth century BCE. In his Works and Days (lines 109-21) he describes the ages as a cycle of decline, from Golden to Silver, Bronze, and Iron. He adds the interesting idea that these ages do not only change the quality of life, but the after-death state of humans. The people of the Golden and Silver Ages, when they died, became spirits who watch over and benefit the human race. The people of the Bronze Age were not immortal in that sense, but went down to a twilight existence in Hades. Perhaps influenced by the Trojan War, Hesiod here inserts an “Age of Heroes” of whom a few crossed the ocean to enjoy a private Golden Age under its ruler Cronos (Saturn). But this did not stem the degeneration for the rest of mankind, which hurtled down to the nadir of the Iron Age. For Hesiod it was too soon to tell their after-death fate, but things were not looking good for them.

    Post-classical culture learned of the Four Ages mainly through Virgil and Ovid. In the first book of his Metamorphoses (I, 89-261) Ovid describes them and their races as declining in happiness and virtue until the universal Deluge. After that a new order of humans, animals, and plants was raised up from the earth. Christians saw a similarity with the biblical story of Noah’s Flood, but even more so in Virgil’s prophecy of a new Golden Age in his own time. It may have been intended to flatter the Emperor Augustus, who had brought peace after Rome’s civil war, but the mention of the Virgin made it applicable to Christ:

    Now comes the last age, sung by the Cumaean Sibyl:
    The great order of ages starts anew.
    The Virgin returns and Saturn’s reign resumes:
    A new race of men is sent from heaven.
    (Eclogue IV, 5-8)

    The Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) do not share the pagan concept of multiple cycles of creation and destruction. Monotheisms have room only for one cycle, with the Garden of Eden before the Fall as equivalent to the Golden Age. To continue the parallel, the Silver Age might be that of the biblical patriarchs who were still intimate with God; the Bronze Age that of the prophets and sacred kings; the Iron Age, from the Babylonian exile up to the present day. The cycle will end with Judgment, after which the Christian elect enter the New Jerusalem and Muslims the Garden of Paradise. Jews have their corresponding Messianic expectation. All three religions promise that in the end God will set things right, or in pagan language, that the reign of Cronos will return.

    Incidentally, one of the recurrent themes of the Golden Age is that during it, the earth’s axis was perpendicular to the ecliptic (a topic treated in my book Arktos2). If this were so there would be no seasons, but equal day and night throughout the year. Plants and trees would fruit continuously, and the years would pass uncounted. Eternity could well describe the human experience of time under such conditions, which ceased when the axis was knocked off kilter. It will be restored at the next Golden Age, when the earth resumes its proper axial position. Whether or not there is any scientific basis to this myth makes no difference to its power and the “thought experiment” that goes along with it.

    The Four Ages (Yugas) of Hinduism

    Hindu tradition has its own version of the Four Ages, and it was probably from there that it reached the Greeks and other Indo-European peoples. The Puranas and Laws of Manu agree that the four Yugas are in the proportion 4:3:2:1. Their names are Krita Yuga (fortunate age; also called Satya Yuga), Treta Yuga (age of three parts), Dwapara Yuga (age of two parts), and Kali Yuga (age of conflict), the four together constituting a Maha Yuga or Great Age.

    Each Yuga has a dawn and a twilight period, each a tenth of its length, called respectively Sandhyá and Sandyásana. The Vishnu Purana gives their durations in divine years, each counting for 360 human years, as follows:3

    ndmain138 64

    To relate these durations to history we need an actual date, and this is supplied by the Hindu astronomers. They agree that the Kali Yuga began at midnight between February 17 and 18, 3102 BCE. From that we can calculate that the transition to the Golden Age will occur around 427,000 CE. It hardly seems worth bothering about something so far outside the time-scale of human experience. But before we dismiss these figures as pure fantasy, we should know that they are not peculiar to Hinduism. Some of them appear in very different contexts, with such precision that there is no question of chance coincidence.

    Berossus, who records the Babylonian chronology, was a priest of Bel and had a school of astronomy on the island of Kos in the third century BCE. He gives the figures for the reigns of the ten Assyrian kings who preceded the Flood: they total 420,000 years.4

    In China, according to the early missionary researcher Père Prémare, the early dynasties were respectively of 13 and 11 kings, each of whom ruled or lived 18,000 years. Prémare understandably doubted this, but if we do the arithmetic, (13 + 11) x 18,000 comes to 432,000 years.5

    The Icelandic saga called the Poetic Edda describes the preparations for the apocalyptic battle at the end of time, when Valhalla’s warriors issue forth against the Fenris Wolf:

    Five hundred doors | and forty there are,
    I ween, in Valhall’s walls;
    Eight hundred fighters | through one door fare
    When to war with the wolf they go.6

    800 fighters going through each of 540 doors totals 432,000. So the number of warriors gathered in Valhalla on the last day is again the number of years in the Kali Yuga, the last age of the Maha Yuga cycle.

    The authors of Hamlet’s Mill, Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, called this a “remarkable and disturbing coincidence.”7 This is because the theory of an archaic worldwide culture with cosmological knowledge is anathema to official prehistory. One breach in the conventional view is due to Ernest McClain, one of the most original and ingenious researchers of our time. He has uncovered evidence of a kind of multidisciplinary game played with these self-same numbers which hinges on musical tuning systems. Those in the know included the Babylonians, the Vedic poets, Plato, the compilers of the Hebrew scriptures, the earliest Christians and Gnostics, and whoever gave the Quran its present form. For example, McClain interprets the Arks of Babylonian and Hebrew legend as multi-story diagrams that enclose, or “save” from the flood all possible numbers, the ones needed for calculating the calendar and the musical scale. In the case of Noah’s Ark, the significant number is none other than 432,000.8

    McClain is a radical with regard to the history of ideas, but even more so are the Traditionalists, who take the numbers not as a philosophical game but as encoding precise knowledge of cosmic and historical time-cycles. René Guénon (1886-1951), one of the few great thinkers to have worked from this assumption, accepted that the four Yugas are in the proportion of 4:3:2:1, but questioned the Puranic figures. The zeros were put there simply to mislead, he says,9 and for good reason. If people knew the real dates, they would try to predict the future, which is unwise “because in practice, such knowledge brings many more problems than advantages.”10 The essential thing is the number 4320, which Guénon takes as representing the Maha Yuga: the set of four Yugas that embraces the entire history of present humanity. But 4320 years is obviously too short a period, just as the 4,320,000 years of the Puranas is too long. There were two basic problems: first, to find the correct multiplier of 4320 in order to arrive at the true length of the Maha Yuga, and second, to find the anchor in known chronology. Guénon seems to have worked backwards from knowledge of another cycle, that of the precession of the equinoxes which is traditionally given as 25,920 years (4320 x 6). Assuming that the Krita Yuga or the “timeless” Golden Age lasted for a whole precessional cycle, this gives the following durations for the four Yugas in human years, with a total of 64,800 years or 4320 x 15:

    Krita, 25,920
    Treta, 19,440
    Dwapara, 12,960
    Kali, 6480

    For all his warnings about attempts to predict the future, Guénon planted straightforward clues, mostly in footnotes, to show how he connected these durations to known chronology. Writing about Atlantis, he says:

    We think that the duration of the Atlantean civilisation must be equal to a “Great Year,” understood as half the period of the Precession of the Equinoxes. As for the cataclysm that brought it to an end, certain concordant data seem to indicate that it took place 7200 years before the year 720 of the Kali Yuga: a year which is itself the departure point of a familiar era, but one whose origin and significance are no longer known to those who currently use it.11

    Guénon typically does not reveal the “concordant data,” but his commentator Jean Robin explains:

    If one knows that the era in question is none other than the Jewish one, whose beginning is traditionally placed 3761 years before the Christian era, it is easy to deduce… the “theoretical” end-date of the cycle. The beginning of the Kali Yuga would thus be in the year 4481 BCE (3761 + 720), and its end would have to come 6480 years later, i.e. in the year 1999 (6480 – 4481).12

    We can now reconstruct Guénon’s chronology as follows:

    ndmain138 65

    Robin was writing in the early 1980s. He reminds us that 1999 is the one date specifically mentioned by Nostradamus as when “a great King of Terror will come from the sky.” But like every other world-ending date, it has come and gone.
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    The orientalist and musicologist Alain Daniélou (1907-1994) knew the Hindu tradition from the inside and was a correspondent of Guénon’s. He too could not accept the extremely large figures given in the Puranas, and reduced them in a different way. There are some problems with his method (explained in my book Atlantis and the Cycles of Time), but it is enough here to give his figures for comparison. Daniélou’s historical peg is the traditional date for the beginning of the Kali Yuga, 3102 BCE, which he says “represents a cosmological reality linked with an alternation in influx from the planetary spheres; it is not an arbitrary date.”13

    ndmain138 66

    By these calculations, the Kali Yuga’s final phase began with World War II. Daniélou, although a much more cheerful type than the saturnine Guénon, was a complete cultural pessimist. He writes that, “the final catastrophe will take place during this twilight. The last traces of this present humanity will have disappeared in 2442.”14 I can imagine him adding, with a smile, “et bon débarras!” [and good riddance!].

    Guénon also corresponded with Gaston Georgel (1899-?), an independent scholar of whom almost nothing is known. He had found that historical events tend to replicate each other at certain rhythmical intervals. Some of his parallels are impressive, such as that of the medieval kings of France with Louis XIV-XVI, at an interval of 539 years (77 × 7), or that of the English and French revolutions, 144 years apart. Georgel first published his cyclical theories in 1937 as Les rythmes dans l’histoire (Rhythms in history).15 He was as yet unaware of Hindu traditions, and his large-scale cycle was one of 2160 years. This is the traditional duration of an astrological age, twelve of which make up the precessional cycle of 25,920 years. Georgel renames the Age of Aries the “Cycle of Abraham,” and the Age of Pisces the “Cycle of Caesar,” which he dates from 130 BCE. He arrived at that date, he says, from “a deep study of the Christic cycle” and the fact that “according to Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, the sun at autumn equinox then entered the sign of Virgo.”16 That sounds authoritative, but as anyone who has studied the astrological ages should know, the borders of the constellations are not fixed (unlike the regular, fictive constellations counting from the spring point as 0° Aries). Consequently the time when the equinoctial sun moves from one to the next is debatable. For instance, the dates given by various authorities for the beginning of the Aquarian Age range from 1760 (Godfrey Higgins) to 2160 (Paul Le Cour).17 

    Guénon agreed that many of Georgel’s coincidences were extraordinary. The next year he wrote his own contribution to the subject, “Some Remarks on the Doctrine of Cosmic Cycles” (1938), in which he interpreted the Puranic numbers as given above. After World War II their correspondence resumed. Georgel returned the compliment by adopting Guénon’s Yuga chronology but stuck to his own dating, saying that “to facilitate our research, we will here adopt the date of AD 2030 that was proposed as a working hypothesis in our first book, for the end of the Manvantara” (i.e. the Maha Yuga of 64,800 years).18

    Georgel found corroboration of the 2030 end-date in a book to which Guénon himself lent much credence: Beasts, Men and Gods by Ferdinand Ossendowski. This best-selling book published in 1922 plays a large role in the myth of Agarttha, which I have treated elsewhere.19 It culminated with a prophecy that the King of the World is supposed to have made in Mongolia in 1891:

    In the fiftieth year only three great kingdoms will appear, which will exist happily seventy-one years. Afterwards there will be eighteen years of war and destruction. Then the peoples of Agharti will come up from their subterranean caverns to the surface of the earth.20

    The fiftieth year from 1891 is 1941. The happy period of 71 years under three great kingdoms lasts from 1941 till 2012. Then 18 more years bring us exactly to 2030.21

    We now have four suggested dates for the end of the Kali Yuga, and with it the end of the present set of four ages. The Puranic figures, taken literally, place it about 427,000 years in the future. Jean Robin, following Guénon, reckoned that it would end in 1999. Daniélou calculated that the Kali Yuga entered twilight phase in 1939 and will end completely in 2442. Georgel’s multiple cycles converge on the year 2030. After that a new Krita/Satya Yuga initiates the next cycle.

    Sri Yukteswar’s Hindu Yuga system

    Many readers will be familiar with the system proposed by Sri Yukteswar Giri (1855-1936). It has had such favourable publicity in recent years that it is widely believed to be the authoritative Hindu Yuga system.22 Sri Yukteswar adopts as his Maha Yuga a 24,000 year period, supposedly that of the precession of the equinoxes. He assigns half these years to a set of descending Yugas in the traditional proportion 4:3:2:1. By taking the “divine years” of the Puranas (see the first table, page 64) as human ones, they total 12,000 years. Then comes his real innovation: the cycle does not repeat, but starts a new set of four Yugas in reverse order. The link to historical chronology seems to be the traditional Kali Yuga starting-date of 3102 BCE, but moved to 3101 and to a different place in the Yuga sequence. From this it is easy to construct a table of Yuketeswar’s system:

    ndmain138 67

    As in the Puranic system, each age is framed by sandhis or periods of mutation at its beginning and end, each worth 1/10 of the Yuga. Thus a Kali Yuga proper lasts 1000 years, with periods of 200 years preceding and following it. In 1894 Yukteswar wrote:

    In 1899, on completion of the period of 200 years of Dwapara Sandhi, the time of mutation, the True Dwapara Yuga of 2000 years will commence and will give to mankind in general a thorough understanding of the electricities and their attributes.23

    The essence of Yukteswar’s system is that it places present-day humanity in an ascending, rather than a descending curve. This is so contrary to all traditions that we must look for its source elsewhere. Upper-caste Indians like Yukteswar may have resented being colonised by the British, but they had bought into the European myth of progress through science. Yukteswar believed that around 1700 the world had entered an “electrical” age. The discovery of electricity and its uses signified to him that man was attaining a finer perception than in the purely materialistic age that had preceded it. Before that, in the dual Kali Yuga, “the intellectual part of man was so much diminished that it could no longer comprehend anything beyond the gross material of creation.”24

    Only historical ignorance can excuse such a statement. The period in question, from 701 BCE to 1699 CE, saw the birth of Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Taoism, Jainism, and Vedanta; of the Orphic and Pythagorean movements, the mysteries of Isis, Serapis, and Mithras, the birth of post-exilic Judaism, Druidry, Christianity, Manicheanism, Gnosticism, Catharism, and Islam. On the esoteric side it witnessed Zen and Vajrayana Buddhism, Sankhya philosophy, Kabbalah, Sufism, theosophy both Neoplatonic and Christian, Rosicrucianism, and the arts of magic, alchemy, and astrology. Reports of miracles were commonplace, and belief in non-material realities such as oracles, curses, the Will of God, the Devil, transubstantiation, or witchcraft was so intense as to cause major wars and persecutions. Finally around 1700, with the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, came a rising tide of disbelief in anything spiritual, leading to the atheism and scientific materialism of today’s elites.

    The Jains and some Buddhist sects also had an up-and down cyclical system, which may have been one of Sri Yukteswar’s inspirations, though their time-scale far exceeds his. His other ingredient was a rough approximation of the precessional cycle to 24,000 years instead of the astronomers’ 25,770 or the traditional 25,920. He anchored it in historical chronology with a clearly political motive, for, along with another future guru, Sri Aurobindo Ghose, he belonged to a secret anti-colonial movement called precisely Yugantar, meaning “New Age” or “Transition of an Epoch.”25 There was a strategic purpose behind the announcement in 1894 that the Kali Yuga was over and the Dwapara Yuga, a better age, already in progress; also behind the emphasis on 1899, only five years away, as the year that the new epoch would come into its own. In the early years of the twentieth century, the movement’s propaganda announced that the “sinful Iron Age was over” and urged insurrection. This is not an attack on Sri Yukteswar and those who respect him and his disciple Yogananda, but simply a reminder that even sages have their agendas. Guénon said as much about the authors of the Puranas!

    What is at stake here is more than allegiance to one authority or another. It is whether one’s world-view allows (1) that humanity as a whole passes through predetermined cycles, and (2) that these are fixed chronologically, hence predictable if one can find the key. For what it is worth, I lean towards the first but not the second, because I trust the microcosm as a guide to understanding the macrocosm, and vice versa. Every one of us is passing through a predetermined cycle whose dates are unpredictable. Barring accidents, we are making our way from the Golden Age of childhood, through the bitter-sweet Silver Age of adolescence and the combative Bronze Age of maturity, to the Iron Age of decline and death. Then we may start afresh, but we certainly don’t repeat the process in reverse! Just as one can estimate someone’s life expectancy by their age, state of health, habits, etc., so one can make a guess at that of civilisations and maybe the entire human race.

    The traditional descriptions of the Kali Yuga, and especially of what Guénon in 1944 called the “Reign of Quantity,” fit the modern world perfectly, and that may give us an idea of our position in the cycle. But like an old person recovering from one close call after another, we seem to be holding on and must be grateful for each new day.

    More information and extensive research on this subject matter can be found in Joselyn Godwin’s book Atlantis and the Cycles of Time (Inner Traditions, 2011).

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    Footnotes

    1. This article quotes and adapts material explained more fully in my book Atlantis and the Cycles of Time (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2011).

    2. J. Godwin, Arktos, The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism, and Nazi Survival (Kempton: Adventures Unlimited, 1996), 13-18.

    3. Compiled from Vishnu Purana, 1:3; see also Linga Purana, 4:24-35; Laws of Manu, 1:68-82.

    4. Eusebius, Chaldaean Chronicle, 1:8.

    5. Joseph Henri Marie de Prémare, Discours préliminaire, in Joseph de Guignes, ed., Le Chou-King, un des livres sacrés des Chinois (Paris: Tilliard, 1770), li.

    6. The Poetic Edda, Grimnismol, 23, trans. Henry Adams Bellows.

    7. Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time (Boston: Gambit, 1969), 162.

    8. Ernest G. McClain, The Myth of Invariance: The Origin of the Gods, Mathematics and Music from the Rig Veda to Plato (New York: Nicolas Hays, 1976), 149.

    9. What follows is summarised from René Guénon, “Quelques remarques sur la doctrine des cycles cosmiques,” in Formes traditionnelles et cycles cosmiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 22-24.

    10. Ibid., 21.

    11. Ibid., 48n.

    12. Jean Robin, Les sociétés secrètes au rendez-vous de l’apocalypse (Paris: Guy Trédaniel, 1985), 67.

    13. Alain Daniélou, While the Gods Play: Shaiva Oracles and Predictions on the Cycles of History and the Destiny of Mankind, trans. Barbara Bailey et al. (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 1987), 193.

    14. Daniélou, While the Gods Play, 197.

    15. Gaston Georgel, Les rythmes dans l’histoire, 3rd ed. (Milan: Archè, 1981; 1st ed. 1937).

    16. Ibid., 164.

    17. See Atlantis and the Cycles of Time, 346-48.

    18. Gaston Georgel, Les quatre âges de l’humanité (Exposé de la doctrine traditionnelle des cycles cosmiques) (Milan: Archè, 1976; 1st ed. 1949), 87.

    19. See J. Godwin, “Agarttha: Taking the Lid Off the Underground Kingdom,” New Dawn 109 (2008), 59-62; also the investigations by Marco Baistrocchi, “Agarttha: A Guénonian Manipulation?” trans. J. Godwin (Fullerton, Ca.: Theosophical History, 2011) and Louis de Maistre, Dans les coulisses de l’Agartha l’extraordinaire mission de Ferdinand Anton Ossendowski en Mongolie. (Paris: Arché, 2010).

    20. Ferdinand Ossendowski, Beasts, Men and Gods (New York: Dutton, 1922), 314.

    21. Gaston Georgel, Le cycle Judéo-Chrétien, sceau et couronnement de l’histoire humaine (Milan: Archè, 1983), 34.

    22. This system is explained in Jnanavatar Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri, The Holy Science (Los Angeles: Self-Realization Fellowship, 1990; 1st ed. 1949), 7-18.

    23. Ibid., 15.

    24. Ibid., 13.

    25. See Terrorism in Bengal: A Collection of Documents on Terrorist Activities from 1905 to 1939, ed. Amiya K. Samanta (Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1995), 1:155. Accessed through Wikipedia article “Mokshadacharan Samadhyayi.”

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