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  • Lost Technology of the Ancients: The Crystal Sun

    Lost Technology of the Ancients: The Crystal Sun

    From New Dawn 65 (Mar-Apr 2001)

    The ancient Greek Pythagoreans of the 5th century BC believed that the sun was a gigantic crystal ball larger than the earth, which gathered the ambient light of the surrounding cosmos and refracted it to earth, acting as a giant lens.

    A giant lens? In the 5th century BC? Perhaps it was because nobody until now has been willing to recognise that lenses existed in antiquity, and that the crystal sun idea was overlooked, and has never been described in any books on the history of science or philosophy. However, it appears in my book The Crystal Sun.

    What, then, is all this about ancient lenses? Surely some mistake?!

    The fact is that I have located more than 450 ancient lenses in museums all round the world, and I even own a Greek crystal lens of the 6th century BC myself. Photos of many of these ancient lenses appear in my book. Anyone interested in full details of the actual lenses themselves should obtain the hardback edition of my book, because ten appendices full of such detailed information have been omitted from the paperback because the book was too thick.

    Ancient lenses! Well, how far back do they go? The earliest actual lenses which I have located are crystal ones dating from the 4th Dynasty of Old Kingdom Egypt, circa 2500 BC. These are to be found in the Cairo Museum and two are in the Louvre in Paris. But archaeological evidence showing that they must have been around at least 700 years earlier has recently been excavated at Abydos in Upper Egypt. A tomb of a Pre-Dynastic king there has yielded an ivory knife handle bearing a microscopic carving which could only have been done under considerable magnification (and of course can only be seen with a strong magnifying glass today). Thus, we know that magnification technology was in use in Egypt in 3300 BC. I reproduce both photos and drawings of this crucial evidence.

    But magnification technology was not of interest merely for making and viewing small carvings. Its most important use was in telescopes. In fact, on the jacket of my book the reader will encounter an ancient image of someone looking through a telescope. This is a photo I took of a fragment of a Greek pot excavated about twenty years ago at the Acrocopolis in Athens, and dating to about the 6th century BC.

    If there is all this evidence, why has no one ever talked about it before? The answer seems to be that unique capacity for stupidity which so distinguishes the human race, for obstinacy and the determination not to see. I call it consensus blindness. Everybody agrees not to look at things that make them uncomfortable, or which they think shouldn’t exist. Therefore, the fact that more than 450 ancient lenses have been sitting around in the world’s museums for all of these years and have been invisible is explicable only by invoking the theory that people subconsciously conspire not to see what they don’t want to see.

    It is not as if I have come up with a little bit of vague evidence and want to use it to construct some wacky theory of my own. There are plenty of people crying in the wilderness with theories based on a little bit of disputed evidence. That is not the case with my book at all. I am standing right in the centre of the town square surrounded by a mountain of evidence which can only be ignored if people are so determined to look the other way that they are prepared to walk around with their necks crooked.

    I attended the 8th International Congress of Egyptologists in Cairo in the spring of 2000, and went prepared to deliver a paper on ancient Egyptian optical technology. But I was not allowed to deliver it. I was told there was ‘no appropriate category’. Alas, it is true that there was no such category, as I was the only historian of science present at the Congress of 1500 people, a fact which I found rather depressing.

    It might be worthwhile to review just why my discoveries are so important for Egyptology, and everyone interested in the pyramids needs to know about them as well.

    First of all, there is the famous question of the orientation of the Great Pyramid. It is so perfectly oriented to the geographical points of the compass that no one has ever been able to understand how this was done, for the accuracy exceeds any hitherto known technology of ancient Egypt.

    Then there is the equally famous question of how the extreme accuracy of the construction of the Great Pyramid was possible. In 1925, J. H. Cole discovered in his survey that the great pavement, upon which the Great Pyramid partially rests and which surrounds it, is flat to within 15 mm. Earlier scholars had commented that the accuracy of the surface of the Great Pyramid was equivalent to the accuracy of the grinding of an optical reflective mirror in a giant modern telescope. The original (now largely destroyed) casing stone sides of the structure have been compared in their precision to the mirror of the Mount Palomar Telescope. How were such feats accomplished?

    Back in the 1960s and 1970s, the Argentine physicist Jose Alvarez Lopez claimed that it was physically impossible for the Great Pyramid to have been constructed without extremely accurate optical surveying techniques such as are used in theodolites. I met Lopez in the 1970s and he told me this himself, arousing my interest in this question for the first time. But Lopez said to me sadly that he could not find any evidence for any ancient optical technology, so it was all a mystery.

    Well, it is a mystery no longer.

    The Great Pyramid was clearly surveyed with early forms of optical surveying instruments that we could call proto-theodolites. This is all described at great length in my book, and I urge anyone interested in the pyramids to read all about it.

    I have proved from archaeological evidence that the technology for surveying the Great Pyramid existed at least as far back as 3300 BC, and doubtless earlier than that, since we can hardly presume that the ivory knife handle was the first such object to exist, as it is already highly sophisticated and suggests a long-standing tradition.

    I was surprised as I strolled through the museums of the world and saw ancient lenses on public display labelled as all kind of crazy things – as anything but lenses! When I went to study ancient Greek lenses in the Department of Classical Antiquities at the British Museum, I met one member of the staff who insisted that there never were any ancient Greek lenses. (This is despite the fact that Aristophanes describes one in his play The Clouds, and there are countless ancient references to optical technology in the ancient literature, which I have combed exhaustively and described in my book.) I then proceeded to photograph and measure some ancient Greek lenses in that very room, which the person concerned refused to acknowledge, and I thought more than a little ironic that there is a display cabinet standing just outside the door to the room containing ancient Greek lenses mis-labelled as ‘counters’, and which can be seen clearly magnifying the strands of the cloth underneath them.

    When I was in the Athens Archaeological Museum studying Mycenaean lenses, which were clearly on display in the Mycenaean Room (where they are mis-labelled), I could not help but be aware that a former Deputy Director of the same museum had written an article about an apparent crystal lens which he had himself excavated on Crete, but he neglected to mention in his article that his own museum had many such lenses in display cabinets which anyone could walk into the museum and see on any day of the week.

    Ancient lenses tended to be of rock crystal until Carthaginian and Roman times, beginning about the 4th century BC, after which glass lenses became more common (being much cheaper), and crystal lenses then became rare.

    I discovered significant numbers of ancient British lenses, mis-catalogued in mineral collections; they had been moved to geological museums from their original archaeological collections and were thought to be ‘crystal specimens’! Some of them were most ingenious, and had what I called ‘resting-points’ protruding from their backs so that they could rest on a surface and an artisan could reach his cutting tool round the back and have both hands free for his work. In ancient Troy, one crystal lens excavated by Schliemann had a hole in the centre. Some people thought this was an argument for claiming that the lens in question was ‘useless’ because it was perforated in the middle and thus clearly no lens. However, the hole in the centre in no way interferes with the magnification, and offers an extremely clever way for an artisan to insert his cutting tool directly through the middle of the magnifier, and have magnification of his work all around it in a circle!

    Schliemann excavated about 48 crystal lenses at Troy, but these all disappeared during the Second World War, and all that remained were catalogue descriptions and a single photo of four of the lenses in a group (reproduced in my book). I tried for many years to find these missing lenses, and a friend who various times approached the museum in East Berlin where the lenses were last known to have been stored was repeatedly lied to and told that the lenses had ‘been destroyed by Allied bombing in the War’. But of course all this was complete rubbish. When the truth finally came out about the missing Trojan gold hoard found by Schliemann, and that the Red Army had seized it and taken it back to Russia, I suspected the lenses were probably with the gold. And indeed they were. But I have never been granted access to them; the Russians are afraid the Germans will claim them back, and so they won’t let scholars have normal opportunities to study them.

    To return to the subject of the ancient British lenses, I should mention that they provide the missing physical evidence that the late Professor Alexander Thom was looking for when he said the accuracy of the astronomical observations of the ancient Britons exceeded the capacities of the naked eye, and he wondered about their optical technology. We now have the lenses that seem to fill Thom’s need. Indeed, there are good reasons for suspecting that the real purpose of the trilithon lintels at Stonehenge were to support a wooden observation platform for telescopic observations of the moon. In other words, Stonehenge would have been domed. I present the evidence for all of this in my book at some length.

    The only group of archaeologists who wholly and enthusiastically welcomed my findings into early optics were the Scandinavian ones, in particular the Swedish archaeologists. Far from being put out with my findings, they were delighted by them. I made very extensive studies of the Viking lenses, and recently one of my articles has been published in Swedish translation in the Swedish archaeological annual, Gotlдndskt Arkiv (Vol. 72 for the year 2000). The Vikings were the last of the ancients, as far as optical technology went, and they accomplished miracles of crystal engineering. They actually produced crystal lenses as small as water drops that could magnify three times. I call their achievements ‘micro-optical technology’.

    Although my discoveries about ancient Chinese optical technology were rather limited (extracts from ancient texts plus reports of six excavated ancient lenses which I was unable to inspect personally, in one case because of floods preventing me from getting to a provincial museum), The Crystal Sun is being translated into Chinese and I have been asked to lecture about it at China’s leading technical university, Tsinghua University in Beijing, of which I am a Fellow.

    My resources not being infinite, I never travelled to Mexico and Peru to inspect the ancient crystal lenses which apparently are to be found there, so the New World is not well represented in my account. I hope others will remedy this deficiency one day. I do, however, have a special account of the so-called ‘Skull of Doom’, a life-sized crystal skull of Maya origin, in my book, since it was the first ancient crystal object I ever studied, when I was 18 years old!

    There is much weird lore in my book, so much so in fact that it cannot all be absorbed as casual reading. I have written a long chapter on the subject of ‘thunderstones’, and another on meditative hallucinations, all of which are linked in wonderful ways to ancient optical ideas. I give a lot of attention to the religious traditions associated with light, from ancient Egypt down through the ‘light-theology’ of Christians like Robert Grosseteste in the Middle Ages.

    But it is not only light that is considered in The Crystal Sun. Shadows are equally important. In ancient Egypt, the science of shadows was far advanced and highly precise. And in this connection I have made a major discovery, which is shown in a photograph taken on 21 December. For I found that there is a special winter solstice sunset shadow cast upon the south face of the Great Pyramid, which nobody had ever noticed before, despite the fact that it has been clearly visible once a year for at least 3500 years. Just think, 3500 missed opportunities!

    As the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas likes to say, ‘Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.’ I would extend this to say: ‘Those who have eyes to see, let them damned well start using them! It would make a change!’

    What is this winter solstice shadow, then? It is a shadow cast by the second pyramid, known as the Pyramid of Khafre (or Chephren, which is the Greek form of the name), upon the Great Pyramid at sunset on 21 December.

    But the mere fact that one pyramid casts a shadow on another is not the point. What is important is the nature of that shadow. And here is where it all gets very interesting. Anyone who has made a study of the interior of the Great Pyramid will be aware that both the ascending and descending passages inside the structure have the same slope, a curious angle of slightly more than 26 degrees. This in itself might seem a bit odd. But bearing in mind how the ancient Egyptians loved a good tease, it was wonderfully amusing and surprising for me to discover that at sunset on the winter solstice they had chosen to project a giant shadow on the exterior of the same structure having the same slope as the passages concealed on the inside!

    It was a bit of a game, surely: what you see on the outside is what you get on the inside, but you can only realise this if you already know it in advance! In other words, it was for the initiated only. They could have their little laugh to themselves, but nobody else knew what the hell was going on.

    I also managed to demonstrate that the ascending passage leading up to the causeway from the Valley Temple beside the Sphinx also has this same slope. Its slope had never been considered or measured before. And yet the fact that its slope is the same as the ascending and descending passages of the Great Pyramid surely indicates a common canon of design for the two structures, at the very least.

    If the Egyptians were really intending to cast a shadow on the outside of the Great Pyramid which secretly indicated the nature of the slopes to be found in the concealed interior, then there are important consequences to be considered: it means that the Pyramid of Khafre had to be the precise size it is, and in precisely the position it is, for this shadow to be correctly cast.

    That is rather a lot of stone to lug around, just to cast a shadow.

    So isn’t there something more to this than just the common slope angle? Well, yes, there is indeed. It just so happens that this odd angle of slightly more than 26 degrees is the only acute angle possible for a right triangle to be formed that is known as ‘the golden triangle’, because it embodies the famous Golden Mean Proportion. And it also just so happens that the Golden Mean Proportion is at the basis of the entire canon of ancient Egyptian art and architecture, as I also explain in my book at some length. And in fact, the shadow if truncated by a vertical line running up the middle of the south face of the Great Pyramid, does actually form a golden triangle, which once again is mirrored on the inside, because it is a similar golden triangle which determines the precise point of commencement of the Grand Gallery on the interior of the pyramid, as I show in a drawing in my book. And as for the vertical line running up the pyramid, that too is real, and has been shown from an aerial photograph, although it is invisible to the naked eye or by any perceptual means at ground level. There is actually a purposeful slight indentation of a few inches in the construction of the side of the pyramid, discovered in measurements made by Petrie. This ‘apothegm’, as geometers call such vertical lines, forms the right angle to transform the solstice shadow into a perfect golden triangle.

    So we see here the Egyptians were playfully carrying on with their geometric obsessions in full view of the world, casting giant shadows in golden mean proportion, but for at least 3500 years nobody noticed.

    All this blindness! What more have we not noticed?

    I hope that people will dip into, if not fully read, The Crystal Sun, because all of these findings are important and need to be known. I was disappointed not to be able to speak at the Cairo Conference and reveal some of these findings to the Egyptologists. For instance, I was able to demonstrate the existence and use of diamond-tip drills in Egypt, but they are so small they can easily be overlooked, just as the much larger lenses always have been. I wanted to warn the diggers that those dirty little objects that might seem like tiny dark pebbles could be diamond drill tips. But alas, they still don’t know.

    One of the lessons from all of this is surely the need for archaeologists not to close their eyes to scientific subjects. They have always been reluctant to study the fundamentals of astronomy, so the field of ‘archaeo-astronomy’ is one of struggle and travail, making relatively little headway in the academic community, despite heroic efforts on the part of a few scholars. But as for ‘archaeo-optics’, as its sole investigator, I fear we have a long way to go before its implications will get through to other scholars. And so, I ask you as readers to help out, by calling these things to the attention of anyone you know, and beating some friendly drums. Let’s get the news out!

    [alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 65.[/alert]

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  • Beyond Left & Right: Escaping the Matrix

    Beyond Left & Right: Escaping the Matrix

    This article was published in New Dawn 62 (Sept-Oct 2000)

    The defining dramatic moment in the film The Matrix occurs just after Morpheus invites Neo to choose between a red pill and a blue pill. The red pill promises “the truth, nothing more.” Neo takes the red pill and awakes to reality – something utterly different from anything Neo, or the audience, could have expected. What Neo had assumed to be reality turned out to be only a collective illusion, fabricated by the Matrix and fed to a population that is asleep, cocooned in grotesque embryonic pods. In Plato’s famous parable about the shadows on the walls of the cave, true reality is at least reflected in perceived reality. In the Matrix world, true reality and perceived reality exist on entirely different planes.

    The story is intended as metaphor, and the parallels that drew my attention had to do with political reality. This article offers a particular perspective on what’s going on in the world – and how things got to be that way – in this era of globalisation. From that red-pill perspective, everyday media-consensus reality – like the Matrix in the film – is seen to be a fabricated collective illusion. Like Neo, I didn’t know what I was looking for when my investigation began, but I knew that what I was being told didn’t make sense. I read scores of histories and biographies, observing connections between them, and began to develop my own theories about roots of various historical events. I found myself largely in agreement with writers like Noam Chomsky and Michael Parenti, but I also perceived important patterns that others seem to have missed.

    When I started tracing historical forces, and began to interpret present-day events from a historical perspective, I could see the same old dynamics at work and found a meaning in unfolding events far different from what official pronouncements proclaimed. Such pronouncements are, after all, public relations fare, given out by politicians who want to look good to the voters. Most of us expect rhetoric from politicians, and take what they say with a grain of salt. But as my own picture of present reality came into focus, “grain of salt” no longer worked as a metaphor. I began to see that consensus reality – as generated by official rhetoric and amplified by mass media – bears very little relationship to actual reality. “The matrix” was a metaphor I was ready for.

    In consensus reality (the blue-pill perspective) “left” and “right” are the two ends of the political spectrum. Politics is a tug-of-war between competing factions, carried out by political parties and elected representatives. Society gets pulled this way and that within the political spectrum, reflecting the interests of whichever party won the last election. The left and right are therefore political enemies. Each side is convinced that it knows how to make society better; each believes the other enjoys undue influence; and each blames the other for the political stalemate that apparently prevents society from dealing effectively with its problems.This perspective on the political process, and on the roles of left and right, is very far from reality. It is a fabricated collective illusion. Morpheus tells Neo that the Matrix is “the world that was pulled over your eyes to hide you from the truth…. As long as the Matrix exists, humanity cannot be free.” Consensus political reality is precisely such a matrix. Later we will take a fresh look at the role of left and right, and at national politics. But first we must develop our red-pill historical perspective. I’ve had to condense the arguments to bare essentials; please see the annotated sources at the end for more thorough treatments of particular topics.

    Imperialism and the Matrix

    From the time of Columbus to 1945, world affairs were largely dominated by competition among Western nations seeking to stake out spheres of influence, control sea lanes, and exploit colonial empires. Each Western power became the core of an imperialist economy whose periphery was managed for the benefit of the core nation. Military might determined the scope of an empire; wars were initiated when a core nation felt it had sufficient power to expand its periphery at the expense of a competitor. Economies and societies in the periphery were kept backward – to keep their populations under control, to provide cheap labour, and to guarantee markets for goods manufactured in the core. Imperialism robbed the periphery not only of wealth but also of its ability to develop its own societies, cultures, and economies in a natural way for local benefit.The driving force behind Western imperialism has always been the pursuit of economic gain, ever since Isabella commissioned Columbus on his first entrepreneurial voyage. The rhetoric of empire concerning wars, however, has typically been about other things – the White Man’s Burden, bringing true religion to the heathens, Manifest Destiny, defeating the Yellow Peril or the Hun, seeking lebensraum, or making the world safe for democracy. Any fabricated motivation for war or empire would do, as long as it appealed to the collective consciousness of the population at the time. The propaganda lies of yesterday were recorded and became consensus history – the fabric of the matrix.While the costs of territorial empire (fleets, colonial administrations, etc.) were borne by Western taxpayers generally, the profits of imperialism were enjoyed primarily by private corporations and investors. Government and corporate elites were partners in the business of imperialism: empires gave government leaders power and prestige, and gave corporate leaders power and wealth. Corporations ran the real business of empire while government leaders fabricated noble excuses for the wars that were required to keep that business going. Matrix reality was about patriotism, national honour, and heroic causes; true reality was on another plane altogether: that of economics.Industrialisation, beginning in the late 1700s, created a demand for new markets and increased raw materials; both demands spurred accelerated expansion of empire. Wealthy investors amassed fortunes by setting up large-scale industrial and trading operations, leading to the emergence of an influential capitalist elite. Like any other elite, capitalists used their wealth and influence to further their own interests however they could. And the interests of capitalism always come down to economic growth; investors must reap more than they sow or the whole system comes to a grinding halt.Thus capitalism, industrialisation, nationalism, warfare, imperialism – and the matrix – coevolved. Industrialised weapon production provided the muscle of modern warfare, and capitalism provided the appetite to use that muscle. Government leaders pursued the policies necessary to expand empire while creating a rhetorical matrix, around nationalism, to justify those policies. Capitalist growth depended on empire, which in turn depended on a strong and stable core nation to defend it. National interests and capitalist interests were inextricably linked – or so it seemed for more than two centuries.

    World War II and Pax Americana

    1945 will be remembered as the year World War II ended and the bond of the atomic nucleus was broken. But 1945 also marked another momentous fission – breaking of the bond between national and capitalist interests. After every previous war, and in many cases after severe devastation, European nations had always picked themselves back up and resumed their competition over empire. But after World War II, a Pax Americana was established. The US began to manage all the Western peripheries on behalf of capitalism generally, while preventing the communist powers from interfering in the game. Capitalist powers no longer needed to fight over investment realms, and competitive imperialism was replaced by collective imperialism (see sidebar below). Opportunities for capital growth were no longer linked to the military power of nations, apart from the power of America. In his Killing Hope, U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (see recommended reading), William Blum chronicles hundreds of significant covert and overt interventions, showing exactly how the US carried out its imperial management role.In the postwar years matrix reality diverged ever further from actual reality. In the postwar matrix world, imperialism had been abandoned and the world was being “democratised”; in the real world, imperialism had become better organised and more efficient. In the matrix world the US “restored order,” or “came to the assistance” of nations which were being “undermined by Soviet influence”; in the real world, the periphery was being systematically suppressed and exploited. In the matrix world, the benefit was going to the periphery in the form of countless aid programs; in the real world, immense wealth was being extracted from the periphery.Growing glitches in the matrix weren’t noticed by most people in the West, because the postwar years brought unprecedented levels of Western prosperity and social progress. The rhetoric claimed progress would come to all, and Westerners could see it being realised in their own towns and cities. The West became the collective core of a global empire, and exploitative development led to prosperity for Western populations, while generating immense riches for corporations, banks, and wealthy capital investors.

    Glitches in the Matrix, Popular Rebellion, and Neoliberalism

    The parallel agenda of Third-World exploitation and Western prosperity worked effectively for the first two postwar decades. But in the 1960s large numbers of Westerners, particularly the young and well educated, began to notice glitches in the matrix. In Vietnam imperialism was too naked to be successfully masked as something else. A major split in American public consciousness occurred, as millions of anti-war protesters and civil-rights activists punctured the fabricated consensus of the 1950s and declared the reality of exploitation and suppression both at home and abroad. The environmental movement arose, challenging even the exploitation of the natural world. In Europe, 1968 joined 1848 as a landmark year of popular protest. These developments disturbed elite planners. The postwar regime’s stability was being challenged from within the core – and the formula of Western prosperity no longer guaranteed public passivity. A report published in 1975, the Report of the Trilateral Task Force on Governability of Democracies, provides a glimpse into the thinking of elite circles. Alan Wolfe discusses this report in Holly Sklar’s eye-opening Trilateralism (see recommended reading). Wolfe focuses especially on the analysis Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington presented in a section of the report entitled “The Crisis of Democracy.” Huntington is an articulate promoter of elite policy shifts, and contributes pivotal articles to publications such as the Council on Foreign Relations’s Foreign Affairs (see recommended reading).Huntington tells us that democratic societies “cannot work” unless the citizenry is “passive.” The “democratic surge of the 1960s” represented an “excess of democracy,” which must be reduced if governments are to carry out their traditional domestic and foreign policies. Huntington’s notion of “traditional policies” is expressed in a passage from the report:To the extent that the United States was governed by anyone during the decades after World War II, it was governed by the President acting with the support and cooperation of key individuals and groups in the executive office, the federal bureaucracy, Congress, and the more important businesses, banks, law firms, foundations, and media, which constitute the private sector’s ‘Establishment’.

    In these few words Huntington spells out the reality that electoral democracy has little to do with how America is run, and summarises the kind of people who are included within the elite planning community. Who needs conspiracy theories when elite machinations are clearly described in public documents like these?

    Besides failing to deliver popular passivity, the policy of prosperity for Western populations had another downside, having to do with Japan’s economic success. Under the Pax Americana umbrella, Japan had been able to industrialise and become an imperial player – the prohibition on Japanese rearmament had become irrelevant. With Japan’s then-lower living standards, Japanese producers could undercut prevailing prices and steal market share from Western producers. Western capital needed to find a way to become more competitive on world markets, and Western prosperity was standing in the way. Elite strategists, as Huntington showed, were fully capable of understanding these considerations, and the requirements of corporate growth created a strong motivation to make the needed adjustments – in both reality and rhetoric.

    If popular prosperity could be sacrificed, there were many obvious ways Western capital could be made more competitive. Production could be moved overseas to low-wage areas, allowing domestic unemployment to rise. Unions could be attacked and wages forced down, and people could be pushed into temporary and part-time jobs without benefits. Regulations governing corporate behaviour could be removed, corporate and capital-gains taxes could be reduced, and the revenue losses could be taken out of public-service budgets. Public infrastructures could be privatised, the services reduced to cut costs, and then they could be milked for easy profits while they deteriorated from neglect.

    These are the very policies and programs launched during the Reagan-Thatcher years in the US and Britain. They represent a systematic project of increasing corporate growth at the expense of popular prosperity and welfare. Such a real agenda would have been unpopular, and a corresponding matrix reality was fabricated for public consumption. The matrix reality used real terms like “deregulation,” “reduced taxes,” and “privatisation,” but around them was woven an economic mythology. The old, failed laissez-faire doctrine of the 1800s was reintroduced with the help of Milton Friedman’s Chicago School of economics, and “less government” became the proud “modern” theme in America and Britain. Sensible regulations had restored financial stability after the Great Depression, and had broken up anti-competitive monopolies such as the Rockefeller trust and AT&T. But in the new matrix reality, all regulations were considered bureaucratic interference. Reagan and Thatcher preached the virtues of individualism, and promised to “get government off people’s backs.” The implication was that everyday individuals were to get more money and freedom, but in reality the primary benefits would go to corporations and wealthy investors.

    The academic term for laissez-faire economics is “economic liberalism,” and hence the Reagan-Thatcher revolution has come to be known as the “neoliberal revolution.” It brought a radical change in actual reality by returning to the economic philosophy that led to sweatshops, corruption, and robber-baron monopolies in the nineteenth century. It brought an equally radical change in matrix reality – a complete reversal in the attitude that was projected regarding government. Government policies had always been criticised in the media, but the institution of government had always been respected – reflecting the traditional bond between capitalism and nationalism. With Reagan, we had a sitting president telling us that government itself was a bad thing. Many of us may have agreed with him, but such a sentiment had never before found official favour. Soon, British and American populations were beginning to applaud the destruction of the very democratic institutions that provided their only hope of participation in the political process.

    Globalisation and World Government

    The essential bond between capitalism and nationalism was broken in 1945, but it took some time for elite planners to recognise this new condition and to begin bringing the world system into alignment with it. The strong Western nation state had been the bulwark of capitalism for centuries, and initial postwar policies were based on the assumption that this would continue indefinitely. The Bretton Woods financial system (the IMF, World Bank, and a system of fixed exchange rates among major currencies) was set up to stabilise national economies, and popular prosperity was encouraged to provide political stability. Neoliberalism in the US and Britain represented the first serious break with this policy framework – and brought the first visible signs of the fission of the nation-capital bond.The neoliberal project was economically profitable in the US and Britain, and the public accepted the matrix economic mythology. Meanwhile, the integrated global economy gave rise to a new generation of transnational corporations, and corporate leaders began to realise that corporate growth was not dependent on strong core nation-states. Indeed, Western nations – with their environmental laws, consumer-protection measures, and other forms of regulatory “interference” – were a burden on corporate growth. Having been successfully field tested in the two oldest “democracies,” the neoliberal project moved onto the global stage. The Bretton Woods system of fixed rates of currency exchange was weakened, and the international financial system became destabilising, instead of stabilising, for national economies. The radical free-trade project was launched, leading eventually to the World Trade Organisation. The fission that had begun in 1945 was finally manifesting as an explosive change in the world system.The objective of neoliberal free-trade treaties is to remove all political controls over domestic and international trade and commerce. Corporations have free rein to maximise profits, heedless of environmental consequences and safety risks. Instead of governments regulating corporations, the WTO now sets rules for governments, telling them what kind of beef they must import, whether or not they can ban asbestos, and what additives they must permit in petroleum products. So far, in every case where the WTO has been asked to review a health, safety, or environmental regulation, the regulation has been overturned.Most of the world has been turned into a periphery; the imperial core has been boiled down to the capitalist elite themselves, represented by their bureaucratic, unrepresentative, WTO world government. The burden of accelerated imperialism falls hardest outside the West, where loans are used as a lever by the IMF to compel debtor nations such as Rwanda and South Korea to accept suicidal “reform” packages. In the 1800s, genocide was employed to clear North America and Australia of their native populations, creating room for growth. Today, a similar program of genocide has apparently been unleashed against sub-Saharan Africa. The IMF destroys the economies, the CIA trains militias and stirs up tribal conflicts, and the West sells weapons to all sides. Famine and genocidal civil wars are the predictable and inevitable result. Meanwhile, AIDS runs rampant while the WTO and the US government use trade laws to prevent medicines from reaching the victims.

    As in the past, Western military force will be required to control the non-Western periphery and make adjustments to local political arrangements when considered necessary by elite planners. The Pentagon continues to provide the primary policing power, with NATO playing an ever-increasing role. Resentment against the West and against neoliberalism is growing in the Third World, and the frequency of military interventions is bound to increase. All of this needs to be made acceptable to Western minds, adding a new dimension to the matrix.

    In the latest matrix reality, the West is called the “international community,” whose goal is to serve “humanitarian” causes. Bill Clinton made it explicit with his “Clinton Doctrine,” in which (as quoted in the Washington Post) he solemnly promised, “If somebody comes after innocent civilians and tries to kill them en masse because of their race, their ethnic background or their religion and it is within our power stop it, we will stop it.” This matrix fabrication is very effective indeed; who opposes prevention of genocide? Only outside the matrix does one see that genocide is caused by the West in the first place, that the worst cases of genocide are continuing, that “assistance” usually makes things worse (as in the Balkans), and that Clinton’s handy doctrine enables him to intervene when and where he chooses. Since dictators and the stirring of ethnic rivalries are standard tools used in managing the periphery, a US president can always find “innocent civilians” wherever elite plans call for an intervention.

    In matrix reality, globalisation is not a project but rather the inevitable result of beneficial market forces. Genocide in Africa is no fault of the West, but is due to ancient tribal rivalries. Every measure demanded by globalisation is referred to as “reform,” (the word is never used with irony). “Democracy” and “reform” are frequently used together, always leaving the subtle impression that one has something to do with the other. The illusion is presented that all economic boats are rising, and if yours isn’t, it must be your own fault: you aren’t “competitive” enough. Economic failures are explained away as “temporary adjustments,” or else the victim (as in South Korea or Russia) is blamed for not being sufficiently neoliberal. “Investor confidence” is referred to with the same awe and reverence that earlier societies might have expressed toward the “will of the gods.”

    Western quality of life continues to decline, while the WTO establishes legal precedents ensuring that its authority will not be challenged when its decisions become more draconian. Things will get much worse in the West; this was anticipated in elite circles when the neoliberal project was still on the drawing board, as is illustrated in Samuel Huntington’s “The Crisis of Democracy” report discussed earlier.

    Management of Discontented Societies

    The postwar years, especially in the United States, were characterised by consensus politics. Most people shared a common understanding of how society worked, and generally approved of how things were going. Prosperity was real and the matrix version of reality was reassuring. Most people believed in it. Those beliefs became a shared consensus, and the government could then carry out its plans as it intended, “responding” to the programmed public will.The “excess democracy” of the 1960s and 1970s attacked this shared consensus from below, and neoliberal planners decided from above that ongoing consensus wasn’t worth paying for. They accepted that segments of society would persist in disbelieving various parts of the matrix. Activism and protest were to be expected. New means of social control would be needed to deal with activist movements and with growing discontent, as neoliberalism gradually tightened the economic screws. Such means of control were identified and have since been largely implemented, particularly in the United States. In many ways America sets the pace of globalisation; innovations can often be observed there before they occur elsewhere. This is particularly true in the case of social-control techniques.The most obvious means of social control, in a discontented society, is a strong, semi-militarised police force. Most of the periphery has been managed by such means for centuries. This was obvious to elite planners in the West, was adopted as policy, and has now been largely implemented. Urban and suburban ghettos – where the adverse consequences of neoliberalism are currently most concentrated – have literally become occupied territories, where police beatings and unjustified shootings are commonplace.So that the beefed-up police force could maintain control in conditions of mass unrest, elite planners also realised that much of the US Bill of Rights would need to be neutralised. (This is not surprising, given that the Bill’s authors had just lived through a revolution and were seeking to ensure that future generations would have the means to organise and overthrow any oppressive future government.) The rights-neutralisation project has been largely implemented, as exemplified by armed midnight raids, outrageous search-and-seizure practices, overly broad conspiracy laws, wholesale invasion of privacy, massive incarceration, and the rise of prison slave labour. The Rubicon has been crossed – the techniques of oppression long common in the empire’s periphery are being imported to the core.

    In the matrix, the genre of the TV or movie police drama has served to create a reality in which “rights” are a joke, the accused are despicable sociopaths, and no criminal is ever brought to justice until some noble cop or prosecutor bends the rules a bit. Government officials bolster the construct by declaring “wars” on crime and drugs; the noble cops are fighting a war out there in the streets – and you can’t win a war without using your enemy’s dirty tricks. The CIA plays its role by managing the international drug trade and making sure that ghetto drug dealers are well supplied. In this way, the American public has been led to accept the means of its own suppression.

    The mechanisms of the police state are in place. They will be used when necessary – as we see in ghettos and skyrocketing prison populations, as we saw on the streets of Seattle and Washington D.C. during recent anti-WTO demonstrations, and as is suggested by executive orders that enable the president to suspend the Constitution and declare martial law whenever he deems it necessary. But raw force is only the last line of defense for the elite regime. Neoliberal planners introduced more subtle defences into the matrix; looking at these will bring us back to our discussion of the left and right.

    Divide and rule is one of the oldest means of mass control – standard practice since at least the Roman Empire. This is applied at the level of modern imperialism, where each small nation competes with other for capital investments. Within societies it works this way: If each social group can be convinced that some other group is the source of its discontent, then the population’s energy will be spent on inter-group struggles. The regime can sit on the sidelines, intervening covertly to stir things up or to guide them in desired directions. In this way most discontent can be neutralised, and force can be reserved for exceptional cases. In the prosperous postwar years, consensus politics served to manage the population. Under neoliberalism, programmed factionalism has become the front-line defense – the matrix version of divide and rule.

    The covert guiding of various social movements has proven to be one of the most effective means of programming factions and stirring them against one another. Fundamentalist religious movements have been particularly useful. They have been used not only within the US, but also to maximise divisiveness in the Middle East and for other purposes throughout the empire. The collective energy and dedication of “true believers” makes them a potent political weapon that movement leaders can readily aim where needed. In the US that weapon has been used to promote censorship on the Internet, to attack the women’s movement, to support repressive legislation, and generally to bolster the ranks of what is called in the matrix the “right wing.”

    In the matrix, the various factions believe that their competition with each other is the process that determines society’s political agenda. Politicians want votes, and hence the biggest and best-organised factions should have the most influence, and their agendas should get the most political attention. In reality there is only one significant political agenda these days: the maximisation of capital growth through the dismantling of society, the continuing implementation of neoliberalism, and the management of empire. Clinton’s liberal rhetoric and his playing around with health care and gay rights are not the result of liberal pressure. They are rather the means by which Clinton is sold to liberal voters, so that he can proceed with real business: getting NAFTA through Congress, promoting the WTO, giving away the public airwaves, justifying military interventions, and so forth. Issues of genuine importance are never raised in campaign politics – this is a major glitch in the matrix for those who have eyes to see it.

    Escaping the Matrix

    The matrix cannot fool all of the people all of the time. Under the onslaught of globalisation, the glitches are becoming ever more difficult to conceal – as earlier, with the Vietnam War. Last November’s anti-establishment demonstrations in Seattle, the largest in decades, were aimed directly at globalisation and the WTO. Even more important, Seattle saw the coming together of factions that the matrix had programmed to fight one another, such as left-leaning environmentalists and socially conservative union members.Seattle represented the tip of an iceberg. A mass movement against globalisation and elite rule is ready to ignite, like a brush fire on a dry, scorching day. The establishment has been expecting such a movement and has a variety of defences at its command, including those used effectively against the movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In order to prevail against what seem like overwhelming odds, the movement must escape entirely from the matrix, and it must bring the rest of society with it. As long as the matrix exists, humanity cannot be free. The whole truth must be faced: Globalisation is centralised tyranny; capitalism has outlasted its sell-by date; matrix “democracy” is elite rule; and “market forces” are imperialism. Left and right are enemies only in the matrix. In reality we are all in this together, and each of us has a contribution to make toward a better world.Marx may have failed as a social visionary, but he had capitalism figured out. It is based not on productivity or social benefit, but on the pursuit of capital growth through exploiting everything in its path. The job of elite planners is to create new spaces for capital to grow in. Competitive imperialism provided growth for centuries; collective imperialism was invented when still more growth was needed; and then neoliberalism took over. Like a cancer, capitalism consumes its host and is never satisfied. The capital pool must always grow, more and more, forever – until the host dies or capitalism is replaced.The matrix equates capitalism with free enterprise, and defines centralised-state-planning socialism as the only alternative to capitalism. In reality, capitalism didn’t amount to much of a force until the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution of the late 1700s – and we certainly cannot characterise all prior societies as socialist. Free enterprise, private property, commerce, banking, international trade, economic specialisation – all of these had existed for millennia before capitalism. Capitalism claims credit for modern prosperity, but credit would be better given to developments in science and technology.

    Before capitalism, Western nations were generally run by aristocratic classes. The aristocratic attitude toward wealth focused on management and maintenance. With capitalism, the focus is always on growth and development; whatever one has is but the seeds to build a still greater fortune. In fact, there are infinite alternatives to capitalism, and different societies can choose different systems, once they are free to do so. As Morpheus put it: “Outside the matrix everything is possible, and there are no limits.”

    The matrix defines “democracy” as competitive party politics, because that is a game wealthy elites have long since learned to corrupt and manipulate. Even in the days of the Roman Republic the techniques were well understood. Real-world democracy is possible only if the people themselves participate in setting society’s direction. An elected official can only truly represent a constituency after that constituency has worked out its positions – from the local to the global – on the issues of the day. For that to happen, the interests of different societal factions must be harmonised through interaction and discussion. Collaboration, not competition, is what leads to effective harmonisation.

    In order for the movement to end elite rule and establish livable societies to succeed, it will need to evolve a democratic process, and to use that process to develop a program of consensus reform that harmonises the interests of its constituencies. In order to be politically victorious, it will need to reach out to all segments of society and become a majority movement. By such means, the democratic process of the movement can become the democratic process of a newly empowered civil society. There is no adequate theory of democracy at present, although there is much to be learned from history and from theory. The movement will need to develop a democratic process as it goes along, and that objective must be pursued as diligently as victory itself. Otherwise some new tyranny will eventually replace the old.

    It ain’t left or right. It’s up and down.
    Here we all are down here struggling while
    the Corporate Elite are all up there having a nice day!
    – Carolyn Chute, author of The Beans of Egypt Maine and anti-corporate activist

    This article was published in New Dawn 62 (Sept-Oct 2000)

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    Footnotes:

    1. Primarily Western Europe, later joined by the United States.
    2. See “KGB-ing America”, Tony Serra, Whole Earth, Winter, 1998.

    Recommended Reading

    Michel Chossudovsky, The Globalization Of Poverty – Impacts of IMF and World Bank Reforms, The Third World Network, Penang, Malaysia, 1997.

    This detailed study by an economics insider shows the consequences of “reforms” in various parts of the world, revealing a clear pattern of callous neo-colonialism and genocide. Definitely red-pill material.

    Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith, eds., The Case Against the Global Economy and for a Turn Toward The Local, Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, 1996.

    This fine collection of forty-three chapters by knowledgeable contributors analyses the broad structure of globalisation, and explores locally based and sustainable economic alternatives. An excellent introduction, textbook, and reference work.

    Richard Douthwaite, The Growth Illusion, Lilliput Press, Dublin, 1992.

    A fascinating and wide-ranging look at growth and capitalism, their historical roots and their consequences. Offers a healthy dose of common sense, and a vision of stability and sustainability.

    Frances Moore Lapp?, Joseph Collins, Peter Rosset, World Hunger, Twelve Myths, Grove Press, New York, 1986.

    Another red pill. Debunks Malthusian thinking, among other things. Here’s a sample: “During the past twenty-five years food production has outstripped population growth by 16 Percent. India – which for many of us symbolizes over-population and poverty – is one of the top third-world food exporters. If a mere 5.6 percent of India’s food production were re-allocated, hunger would be wiped out in India.”

    Hans-Peter Martin & Harald Schumann, The Global Trap, Globalization & the Assault on Democracy & Prosperity, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1997.

    A best-selling European perspective on globalisation. Recommended for American audiences in order to understand more about the European context.

    William Greider, One World Ready or Not, the Manic Logic of Global Capitalism, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1997.

    A tour by a superb journalist showing how the global economy operates in various parts of the world. Not much emphasis on political issues or economic alternatives.

    James Goldsmith, The Response, Macmillan, London, 1995.

    A critique of neoliberal thinking presented as a debate with those who criticised the author’s previous book, The Trap. It may be pointless for the author to attempt logical debate with matrix apologists, but the book is informative for readers.

    Third World Resurgence, a magazine published monthly by the Third World Network, Penang, Malaysia, http://www.twnside.org.sg.

    This magazine deserves widespread circulation. It covers a wide range of global issues, presents a strong and sensible third-world perspective, and is a very good source of real-world news. Martin Kohr is managing editor and a frequent contributor.

    The New Internationalist, a magazine published monthly by New Internationalist Publications, Ltd, Oxford, UK, http://www.newint.org.

    Another good source of real news and commentary, with a global perspective.

    Holly Sklar ed., Trilateralism – the Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management, South End Press, Boston, 1980.

    This well-researched anthology explains the role in global planning played by such elite organisations as the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Bilderbergers. Examples from various parts of the world are used to show what kinds of considerations go into the formation of on-the-ground policies.

    Michael Parenti, The Sword and the Dollar, Imperialism, Revolution, and the Arms Race, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1989.

    One of many red-pill books by a prolific and well-informed author. Here he talks about the reality of imperialism and the matrix of Cold War rhetoric. For an insightful examination of how matrix reality is fabricated, see also his Make-Believe Media, and Inventing Reality, also from St. Martin’s.

    Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, HarperCollins, New York, 1989.

    A superlative and well-researched treatment of American history from 1942 to the present. The material on grass-roots social movements provides valuable lessons for present-day movement organisers.

    William Blum, Killing Hope, U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II, Common Courage Press, Monroe Maine, 1995.

    A comprehensive review of how the US government manages world affairs by force and intrigue when persuasion and economic pressure fail to do the job. A red-pill antidote for anyone who feels tempted to trust the “international community” to pursue “humanitarian interventionism.”

    Covert Action Quarterly magazine, published quarterly by Covert Action Publications, Inc., Washington D.C. 1994, http://www.covertaction.org.

    Keeps you up-to-date on covert activities, cover-ups, military affairs, and current trouble spots. Contributors include many ex-intelligence officers who saw the error of their ways.

    William Greider, Who Will Tell the People, the Betrayal of American Democracy, Touchstone – Simon & Schuster, New York, 1993.

    This best seller shows in detail how the American democratic process is subverted at every stage by corporate interests. Greider was a highly respected journalist for many years at the Washington Post and his high-level contacts permit him to present an insider’s view of how the influence-peddling system actually operates. A chilling eye-opener.

    Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash Of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Simon and Schuster, London, 1997.

    Another classic by one of the foremost spinners of matrix illusion. In the guise of historical analysis, Huntington fabricates a worldview designed to justify Western domination under globalisation. According to The Economist, Huntington’s civilisation-clash paradigm has already become the “sea” in which Washington policy makers swim. The book reveals the backbone structure of modern matrix reality, putting day-to-day official rhetoric into an understandable framework. And it clearly reveals the real intentions of elite planners regarding the tactics of global management through selective interventionism.

    Foreign Affairs, a journal published quarterly by the Council on Foreign Relations, New York.

    The best source I’ve found to track the latest shifts in the matrix and to glean an understanding of current elite thinking. Some reading between the lines is called for, as the journal frames its analysis in terms of US national interests, failing to make the obvious links between geopolitical and economic regimes.

     

    Elite planning for postwar neo-imperialism…

    Recommendation P-B23 (July, 1941) stated that worldwide financial institutions were necessary for the purpose of “stabilizing currencies and facilitating programs of capital investment for constructive undertakings in backward and underdeveloped regions.” During the last half of 1941 and in the first months of 1942, the Council developed this idea for the integration of the world…. Isaiah Bowman first suggested a way to solve the problem of maintaining effective control over weaker territories while avoiding overt imperial conquest. At a Council meeting in May 1942, he stated that the United States had to exercise the strength needed to assure “security,” and at the same time “avoid conventional forms of imperialism.” The way to do this, he argued, was to make the exercise of that power international in character through a United Nations body.
    — Laurence Shoup & William Minter, in Holly Sklar’s Trilateralism (see recommended reading), writing about strategic recommendations developed during World War II by the Council on Foreign Relations.The above article first appeared in Whole Earth Magazine #101, Summer 2000.

    © New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
    For our reproduction notice, click here.

  • Hyperborea & the Quest for Mystical Enlightenment

    Hyperborea & the Quest for Mystical Enlightenment

    From New Dawn 58 (Jan-Feb 2000)

    Far north, somewhere near the icy regions of the North Pole, legend speaks of an ancient and mostly forgotten civilisation. Mythical in character, the Hyperborean civilisation is said to have flourished in the northern most region of planet Earth at a time when the area was suitable for human habitation.

    According to certain esoteric systems and spiritual traditions, Hyperborea was the terrestrial and celestial beginning of civilisation. The home of original Man. Some theories postulate Hyperborea was the original Garden of Eden, the point where the earthly and heavenly planes meet. And it is said Man transgressed Divine Law in this Golden Age civilisation, the ultimate price being his banishment to the outside world. Man ventured into other regions of Earth, establishing new civilisations, bringing to an end this great and glorious Golden Age.

    The Golden Age is central to manifold ancient traditions and myths. Significantly, the Golden Age appears most frequent in the traditions of cultures stretching from India to Northern Europe — the area directly beneath the Polar regions. Joscelyn Godwin, in Arktos, The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism and Nazi Survival, says:

    The memory or imagination of a Golden Age seems to be a particularity of the cultures that cover the area from India to Northern Europe… But in the ancient Middle East there is an obvious relic of the Golden Age in Genesis, as the Garden of Eden where humanity walked with the gods before the Fall. The Egyptians spoke of past epochs ruled by god-kings. Babylonian mythology… had a scheme of three ages, each lasting while the vernal [Spring] equinox precessed through four signs of the zodiac; the first of these, under the dominion of Anu, as a Golden Age, ended by the Flood. The Iranian Avesta texts tell of the thousand-year Golden Reign of Yima, the first man and the first king, under whose rule cold and heat, old age, death and sickness were unknown.1

    The most fully developed theory of this kind, and probably the oldest one, is the Hindu doctrine of the Four Yugas. The four ages in this system are the Krita or Satya Yuga (four units), Treta Yuga (three), Dvapara Yuga (two), and Kali Yuga (one), the whole tenfold period making up one Mayayuga. The Kritayuga corresponds to the Golden Age, the Kali Yuga to the current period of time.

    Every description of the Golden Age period relates how the ‘gods’ walked with men in a perfect and harmonious environment balanced between the terrestrial and celestial. Humanity suffered no sickness and no aging in this timeless paradise. After the Fall, man ‘fell’ into Time and suffering, forfeiting the gift of immortality.

    Madame Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophical Society, claimed the ‘second root race’ originated in Hyperborea, before the later races of Lemuria and Atlantis. The Russian metaphysician Alexandre Dugin says that it was the home of the “solar people”, connected to what is now northern Russia. “Solar people,” Alexandre Dugin explains, are a “cultural-spiritual type” who are creative, energetic and spiritual. They are the opposite of “lunar people”, a psycho-spiritual type who are materialistic, conservative and wary of change.

    The ancient Greeks had a legend of Hyperborea, a land of perpetual sun beyond the “north wind”. Hecataeus (circa 500 BC) says that the holy place of the Hyperboreans, which was built “after the pattern of the spheres”, lay “in the regions beyond the land of the Celts” on “an island in the ocean.” According to popular accounts, the God Apollo’s temple at Delphi was founded by individuals from Hyperborea. The Greek lyric poet Alcaeus (600 BC) sang of the actual or mystical journey of Apollo to the land of the Hyperboreans:

    O King Apollo, son of great Zeus, whom thy father did furnish forth at thy birth with golden headband and lyre of shell, and giving thee moreover a swan-drawn chariot to drive, would have thee go to Delphi… But nevertheless, once mounted, thou badest thy swans fly to the land of the Hyperboreans.

    The wearing of a star-embroidered robe by the King and ‘Ruler of the World’ — the heavenly sphere serving as a symbol of the earthly one — is a custom that can be traced to the Hyperboreans. Embroidered in gold on blue silk were the figures of the sun, moon and stars. Such robes were worn by the kings of Ancient Rome and Julius Ceasar, as well as Augustus and the Roman Emperors.

    Earthenware statuettes found in a grave in Yugoslavia show the ‘Hyperborean Apollo’ in a chariot drawn by swans. The god wears, on his neck and breast, yellow figures of the sun and stars; on his head is a rayed crown with a headband that has a zigzag pattern. His robe, which reaches to the ground, is dark blue with yellow designs.

    Collapse of Hyperborea

    One of the most popular theories for the collapse of Hyperborea was a physical inclination (catastrophe) of the Earth’s axis. Man’s transgression of Divine Law caused a shift in the metaphysical balance, the effect of which was catastrophic on the Earth plane. Julius Evola, the noted Italian metaphysician, explains that at this point the first cycle of history closed, and that of the second, the Atlantean, began:

    The memory of this Arctic seat is the patrimony of the traditions of many people, in the form either of real geographic allusions, or of symbols of its function and original significance, often transferred to a super-historical significance, or else applied to other centres that may be considered as copies of the original one… Above all, one will notice the interplay of the Arctic theme with the Atlantic theme… It is known that the astrophysical phenomenon of the inclination of the earth’s axis causes a change of climate from one epoch to another. Moreover, as tradition tells, this inclination took place at a given moment, and in fact through the alignment of a physical and a metaphysical fact, as if a disorder in nature were reflecting a certain situation of a spiritual order… At any rate, it was only at a certain moment that ice and eternal night descended on the polar region. Then, with the enforced emigration from that seat, the first cycle closed and the second opened, initiating the second great era, the Atlantean Cycle.2

    The memory of a Golden Age, although rendered in an archetypal or mythological form, serves a super-historical purpose. This is why the remembrance of the ancient civilisation of Atlantis is sometimes enmeshed with that of Hyperborea. We cannot expect to ‘prove’ the physical existence of these civilisations. All myths are known to have a historical basis. Transmitted primarily by oral tradition, they are wrapped in a catchy and simple tale that ensures their survival and transmittal down through the ages. Myth serves an extremely vital function — a recollection of our beginnings, a knowledge of where we are heading, and what we are supposed to do. It is only now in the Kali Yuga that we have disconnected from tradition, losing the ability to correctly interpret and understand myths with historical kernels of truth.

    Hyperborea Revived

    The legend of Hyperborea revived during the 18th and 19th centuries when a flurry of books were published dealing with the idea that civilisation had first appeared not in the Middle East, but somewhere else.

    The popular theory of the day postulated that the so-called ‘Aryans’ (Europeans) were superior and more intelligent than Semites (Middle East peoples). Therefore, logically, civilisation could not have originated in the Middle East and Hebrew was probably not the first language.

    The Frenchmen of the Enlightenment were in no doubt that “Eden” was situated on higher ground. The Germans similarly, who were looking for their Aufklarung, also sought to be free of a history tied to the Mediterranean and Middle East regions. British and German scholars studied ancient Indian (Vedic) civilisation and leant the Sanskrit language. Many believed Sanskrit the original language of the ‘Aryans’.

    With new sources of knowledge from ancient Egypt, Chaldea, China and India, researchers were treading on dangerous ground as far as questioning Man’s origins. Biblical history was still strictly upheld and moving too far from this historical boundary could have you silenced.

    Writers such as Jean-Sylvain Bailly (1736-1793), the Rev. Dr. William Warren (1800s), Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856-1929) and H.S. Spencer (1900s), developed out theories, often borrowing from earlier sources, attempting to prove man’s origins in the Polar region.

    Tilak’s book Arctic Home (published 1903) begins by stating the well known fact that warm weather remains in the Arctic regions, which shows the climate was far different during the interglacial period. According to Tilak, scientists do concede the existence, in the past, of a warm circumpolar continent, and the circumstances there would not have been nearly unfavourable as imagined.

    Tilak was convinced the ancient Indian Vedic texts point unmistakably to a “realm of the gods” where the sun rises and sets once a year, showing that their writers could understand the astronomical conditions at the North Pole.

    Tilak, who had a perfect mastery of Vedic language, placed the original Arctic home existing around circa 10,000 BC, just prior to its destruction and the beginning of the last Ice Age.

    His book had little impact in the West but was popular in India. When the learned Zoroastrian H.S. Spencer wrote his book The Aryan Ecliptic Cycle (1965), a development of Tilak’s work, he was able to obtain endorsements from Sir S. Radhakrishna, then President of India. As well as from dignitaries of the Theosophical Society in Adyar and the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondichary.

    Spencer’s approach commenced not with the Vedic but the Zoroastrian scriptures, going further than Tilak in tracing the progress of the ‘Aryans’ from the North to their new homes, and the schisms that beset them on the way.

    Spencer’s ‘Aryans’ made their presence felt after they travelled far and wide. They moulded the religions and cultures of Egypt, Sumeria, Babylon, and of the Semites, hitherto worshippers of feminine lunar deities.

    However, the search for a terrestrial ‘Hyperborea’ by many researchers and the movement of an original ‘race’ has been extremely difficult and presumptuous. Proving human habitation possible at the North Pole somewhere between 8000 and 10,000 BC is no mean feat, particularly if you were living in the 18th century. The numerous theories posited offering contradictory or tendentious ‘evidence’ has served only to discredit the whole notion of Hyperborea. The same could be said of theories attempting to prove the existence of the ‘lost continent of Atlantis’. The drive to prove the actuality of a terrestrial Hyperborea has overshadowed its occult and symbolic importance.

    The Spiritual Pole

    In the quest to discover the ‘physical’ location of Hyperborea, most writers overlooked the possibility that the mythology served a special symbolic and spiritual purpose. What if the truth behind the legend was esoteric, and not exoteric as some even today still maintain?

    Many traditions speak of a supreme spiritual centre or ‘supreme country’. The ‘supreme country’ that does not necessarily lay at a specific earthly point, but exists in a primordial state, unaffected by terrestrial cataclysms.

    The ‘supreme country’, commonly regarded as ‘polar’ in orientation, symbolically is always represented as being at the ‘Axis of the world’ — and in most cases is referred to as a ‘Sacred Mountain’. Rene Guenon in his book The Lord of the World says:

    Almost every tradition has its name for this mountain, such as the Hindu Meru, the Persian Alborj, and the Montsalvat of Western Grail legend. There is also the Arab mountain Qaf and the Greek Olympus, which has in many ways the same significance. This consists of a region that, like the Terrestrial Paradise, has become inaccessible to ordinary humanity, and that is beyond the reach of those cataclysms which upset the human world at the end of certain cyclic periods. This region is the authentic ‘supreme country’ which, according to certain Vedic and Avestan texts, was originally sited towards the North Pole, even in the literal sense of the word. Although it may change its localisation according to the different phases of human history, it still remains polar in a symbolic sense because essentially it represents the fixed axis around which everything revolves.3

    The Vedic texts say the ‘supreme country’ is known as Paradesha, also called the ‘Heart of the World’. It is the word from which the Chaldeans formed Pardes, and Westerners Paradise.

    There is notably another name for it probably even older than Paradesha. This name is Tula, called by the Greeks Thule. Common to regions from Russia to Central America, Tula represented the primordial state from which spiritual power emanated.

    It is known that the Mexican Tula owes its origin to the Toltecs who came, it is said, from Aztlan, the ‘land in the middle of the water’, which is evidently Atlantis. They brought the name Tula from their country of origin and gave it to a centre which consequently must have replaced, to a certain extent, that of the lost continent. On the other hand, the Atlantean Tula must be distinguished from the Hyperborean Tula, which latter represents the first and supreme centre….4

    In this case — Tula — representing a centre of spiritual authority — does not remain fixed in a geographical location. Guenon states that the Atlantean cycle, successor to the Hyperborean cycle, is associated with Tula. The Atlantean Tula is an image of the original primordial state situated in a northern or Polar location. As world cycles progress onward, the supreme seat of spiritual power regresses further and further into hiding and obscurity. This, of course, is deliberate and predictable as humanity descends into the end of the age (Kali Yuga), progressively enmeshing itself in the material plane until the reversal of established world order is imposed.

    It should be emphasised here that Tula, or the centre of spiritual authority, constitutes the fixed point known symbolically to all traditions as the ‘pole’ or axis around which the world rotates. Metaphysically speaking, the world rotates around this seat of power even if it’s not geographically North or South.

    In the Buddhist tradition ‘Chakravarti’ literally means “He who makes the wheel turn”, which is to say the one who, being at the centre of all things, directs all movement without himself participating, or who is, to use Aristotle’s words, the “unmoving mover”.

    The turning of the world, the ‘Pole’ and axis, combine to depict a wheel in the Celtic, Chaldean and Hindu traditions. Such is the true significance of the swastika, seen worldwide from the Far East to the Far West, which is intrinsically the ‘sign of the Pole’.

    The Pole and Mystical Enlightenment

    It is in medieval Iran that we find extant literature on the Spiritual Pole and the experience of mystical ascent to it. The Iranian Sufis, drawing not only on Islam but on the Mazdean, Manichean, Hermetic, Gnostic and Platonic traditions, blended a sacred knowledge said to be ‘scientific’, mystical and philosophically practical.

    Esoterically… the Persian theosophers situated their “Orient” neither to the East, nor to the South, wither they faced in prayer towards the Ka’ba. “The Orient sought by the mystic, the Orient that cannot be located on our maps, is in the direction of the north, beyond the north.” [The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism by Henry Corbin, 1978] About this Pole reigns a perpetual Darkness, says the Recital of Hayy ibn Yaqzan, one of the visionary recitals of Avicenna (Ibn Sina). “Each year the rising sun shines upon it at a fixed time. He who confronts that Darkness and does not hesitate to plunge into to it for fear of difficulties will come to a vast space, boundless and filled with light.” [Ibid] This Darkness, says Corbin, is the ignorance of the natural man. “To pass through it is a terrifying and painful experience, for it ruins and destroys all the patencies and norms on which the natural man lived and depended…” [Ibid] But it must be faced consciously before one can acquire the saving gnosis of the light beyond.

    The Darkness around the Pole, annually pierced by the sun’s rays, is at once terrestrial and symbolic. On the one hand, this is the situation at the North Pole, where there are six months of night and six of day. It is characteristic of esoteric tradition that the same image is valid on two or more levels. But as Corbin and Guenon never tired of pointing out, the symbolic level is not a fanciful construct on the basis of hard terrestrial fact: it is quite the other way round. In the present case, the mystical experience of penetrating the Darkness at the Pole is the fundamental reality and the authentic experience of the individual. The fact that the set-up of the material world reflects the celestial geography is what is contingent. In brief, in this teaching as in Platonism, it is the supersensible realm that is real, and the material realm that is a shadow of it.5

    The seeker, through deep meditation on spiritual matters, succeeds in entering a world of mystical experience, and makes a pilgrimage to Hyperborea that can not be discovered from maps. Aristeas, the Greek poet, in shamanic rapture, is said to have travelled to Hyperborea while “possessed by Apollo”. Mystical soul-travel to Hyperborea is common in ancient Greek literature.

    The journey to this Pole is sometimes illustrated as the ascent of a column of light, extending from the depths of hell to the lucid paradise in the cosmic North.

    As previously mentioned, the Pole is also a Mountain, called Mount Qaf in Islamic tradition, whose ascent, like Dante’s climbing of the Mountain of Purgatory, represents the pilgrims progress through spiritual states.

    Guenon, in The Lord of the World, explains “the idea evoking the representation under discussion is essentially one of ‘stability’, that is itself a characteristic of the Pole.” The Mountain, referred to as an ‘Island’, “remains immovable amidst the ceaseless agitation of the waves, a disturbance that reflects that of the external world. Accordingly, it is necessary to cross the ‘sea of passions’ in order to reach the ‘Mount of Salvation’, the ‘Sanctuary of Peace’.”

    Our search for Hyperborea is our desire to return to Paradesha or Paradise — the primordial spring of Man’s original existence. The importance of knowing the terrestrial location of a lost civilisation at the northern regions is thus overshadowed by its symbolic relevance.

    To seek Hyperborea is to quest for spiritual enlightenment. The Mountain, the Island, the immovable Rock, fixed in a Polar orientation, relays a symbolic representation of our search for Ultimate Reality. Its immovability anchors us to this important task.

    [alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 58.[/alert]

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    Footnotes:

    1. Arktos, The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism and Nazi Survival by Joscelyn Godwin, p. 16.
    2. Quoted in Arktos, The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism and Nazi Survival, p. 58-9, original source Revolt Against the Modern World by Julius Evola, 1951.
    3. The Lord of the World by Rene Guenon, p. 50.
    4. Ibid, p. 56
    5. Arktos, The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism and Nazi Survival by Joscelyn Godwin, p. 167-8.

    © New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.

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  • How the Great Pyramid Was Built

    How the Great Pyramid Was Built

    From New Dawn 54 (May-June 1999

    No one in the world really knows how the Great Pyramid of Giza was built – that is, of course, except for myself! Such is how I start a lecture or speech on this controversial subject. As an attention grabber, it works well, but it is nothing compared to the subject matter at hand.

    There are about as many proposed methods of construction as there are people who propose theories on the subject, with the informed reader aware of most. The following brief and condensed explanation of the Great Pyramid’s construction is one of the most fantastic and unconventional methods ever proposed. With some consideration, this is possibly the method that makes the most sense.

    The following narrative of the Great Pyramid’s construction is based on a privately published and very rare book called Pharaoh’s Pump written by the late independent researcher, Edward J. Kunkel. This is the book that is so highly regarded in the recent best selling book, 5/5/2000: Ice, the Ultimate Disasterby Richard W. Noone.

    Pharaoh’s Water Pump

    Traditional Egyptologists explain the subterranean passages and the chamber deep below the Great Pyramid as a change in design. Egyptologists tell us after working so long and hard on this part of construction the Pharaoh decided he wanted to be entombed in a chamber up in the pyramid. Pyramidologists tell us the passages are designed and built as Man’s prophetic chronology set in stone. Others say the descending passage and subterranean room were used to view the stars.

    The Pharaoh’s Pump Foundation and the book Pharaoh’s Pump maintain that these passages cut into solid bedrock are a colossal and enormous hydraulic ram pump! This hydraulic ram pump is built on a gigantic scale never duplicated in the ancient or modern world. Massive amounts of pumped water was used to supply a series of water locks, up to the Great Pyramid, transporting barges with stones to the building site. With its own pumped water and a series of water locks as a lifting medium, the Great Pyramid supplied its own water power to build itself!

    Before the Great Pyramid’s construction, the site was not flat but a granite outcropping. The shape and size of this outcropping is unknown. In the finished pyramid the granite outcropping protrudes up to a height near the bottom of the Grand Gallery. The site is on a gradual sloping hillside. Uphill from the Great Pyramid is the Libyan Desert.

    Almost all agree that the two subterranean shafts and the subterranean room were excavated before the pyramid was built. Herodotus, the famous Greek historian, tells us ten years were spent in preparation. The subterranean excavations at the construction site were the preparatory work needed before construction started.

    At this stage of construction, there was only one mechanical element needed to create the largest, most colossal, hydraulic ram water pump ever created! That one single mechanical element being a drain and valve. The dead end shaft, cut in the south-eastern corner of the Subterranean Chamber is 2 feet 7 inches wide, 2 feet 5 inches high and 52 feet 9 inches long. Its direction is from true north to south. Its position is horizontal and it lies at the lowest corner of the lowest chamber. This suggests that it functioned as a drain, but it dead ends in the rock. Even though it is 105 feet below the base of the building, it is still high enough from the outside to function as a drain.

    The cutting of this shaft must have been an awful job. It is so small – only 29 inches high and 31 inches wide with a length of 52 feet, leaving very little elbow room. Maybe a midget crew cut it. I’ll never believe that its existence is due to over-sight or gross error. I’ll never shrug it off as a miscalculation. I have too much respect for the ancient engineers for that. Why is there so much interest in the lowest shaft of the Subterranean Chamber? The answer lies in this simple fact: a waste duct in this particular area would be definite proof that the engineers had cut a simple water ram in the solid rock!

    Around the base of the Great Pyramid and in its immediate vicinity are a number of unusual and hard to explain cuttings in the solid rock. Among these cuttings are the “crypts” that contain the so-called “sunships.” Traditional Egyptologists maintain these ships were entombed at the same time as the Pharaoh and the ships were used during the funereal precession. The location of the sun ship pit and other features indicate that they were created at the same time as the Great Pyramid and were part of a drain system with a valve that would complete the greatest water ram pump in the world. The dead end shaft that leads south from the Subterranean Chamber heads directly towards the sunship pit. This water drain system of the pump was unnecessary after the Great Pyramid was completed. Later the ancients used the pit for ceremonial purposes after the functional purpose of this cutting was no longer needed. Our current understanding of the passage from the Subterranean Chamber towards the sunship pit is that the passage is a dead end.

    Apparently this dead end has never been examined with the idea in mind that it may be a drain duct. In 1954, two sun ships were discovered in the rock hewn cavity at the very southern base of the pyramid. It is reasonable to assume that the size and shape of this cavity has been surveyed and recorded. Such data is hard to come by. It would be interesting to examine the north wall and ascertain the distance from it to the terminus of the dead end. The terminus of the dead end is about 83 feet south of dead centre of the building. This leaves a space of about 300 feet to its southern base. In short, I believe there exists a connecting duct, between the dead end and the sun ship cavity. Explorers might hit pay-dirt if they take a good hard look at the end of the dead end and the north wall of the sun ship’s crypt.

    This pump was a simple water ram of monstrous proportions. A ram that pumps far more water than it wastes. My guestimate? At least 4 tons for one ton of wastage to a height of 60 feet during a time cycle of one minute. The sun ship cavity itself may be part of it. My line of reasoning follows this pattern. Originally, the cavity was cut for use as part of the drain for the water pump. When the Great Pyramid was completed the pit was no longer needed. Only after the construction of the Great Pyramid were the sun ships installed in their pits. Why not decorate and touch up these pits with some regal trappings?

    I have believed from the very beginning that this tube is part of a drain and that its outlet is sealed in as clever a fashion as the ancients managed to conceal other openings. It is utterly fantastic to believe that the ancient engineers overlooked this common device – a drain that can be opened and closed at will and thus employ the same mechanics of the common ram. I predict that one or more baffle walls will be found in the horizontal tube leading south from the subterranean chamber, the function of which is to slow down the high velocity of water discharge and ease the shock exerted on the waste valve.

    What will the drain valve look like? It will be a “door with pivots.” We call them butter-fly valves. They are easy to open and close and are operated by a handle. Pairs of holes with granite seats to fit this type of valve are found in the passage near the top of the lower diagonal. No one, for a moment, doubt that these seats and holes are for this type of “door.”

    There are two other check valves in the subterranean cuttings. A short distance down in the solid rock of the lower diagonal is an offset “wherein,” says Sir Flinders Petrie (The Pyramids and Temples of Giza), “hung a door that swung inward.” A pair of eight inch round holes are found here, one in the east wall and the other in the west wall. Adjacent to these round holes is granite masonry. This mechanical element, given a hydraulic interpretation, is a check-valve. The holes support a round shaft and the granite masonry is the valve seat. Halfway up the passage leading from the Subterranean Chamber to the lower part of the Grand Gallery is the Grotto. Detailed research indicates it too in ancient times housed a check valve.

    How the Water Was Pumped

    The Ancients were doing what every engineer does before he undertakes a massive construction project. The machine comes first, and in this case it was a water pump. These subterranean cuttings formed a hydraulic ram pump. The lower diagonal holds about 88 tons of water! When the valve in the drain is opened the water in the lower diagonal moves down. Then the drain valve is closed. The water in the lower diagonal continues to move down compressing the air in the Subterranean Chamber. This chamber has an air capacity of 7000 cubic feet! Once this moving water has compressed the air to the maximum, the water stops moving. At that point, the check valve in the upper end of the lower diagonal closes. The highly compressed air in the Subterranean Chamber pushes water up through the “grotto” and onto the rocky knoll. Research including computer modelling shows that the water ram pump would easily pump water to a height of the top of the completed Great Pyramid.

    Water ram pumps are a very interesting device and are still being built and sold to this day. Water ram pumps work and work well. When you shut a water faucet off and the pipes rattle, think about the ancient engineers who used the same force in a colossal scale to move and lift the blocks in constructing the Great Pyramid.

    What existed at this point is a mound of rock with a passage in the centre that leads up from the Subterranean Chamber and the descending passage down to the Subterranean Chamber. All of the subterranean passages and subterranean valves were finished and the colossal hydraulic ram was ready to go. The source of water for the pump was the ancient lake of Moeris. This lake was huge, about the size of Lake Erie. Its elevation was above the base of the Great Pyramid. Water for the pump was brought to the site and channelled into the lower diagonal from this lake.

    If the hydraulic ram pump pushes water up the central shaft it will be wasted because the water will just flow down the granite outcropping. At this stage, parabulious walls were built around the building site. This created a catch basin for the water. Near the base of the Great Pyramid to this day can be seen these same “parabolus walls” made of earth, which surround the building. The walls form a rectangular basin and look like the remains of an ancient catch basin or reservoir. The 14 foot vein of river silt found inside is mighty convincing evidence that in ancient times this rectangular enclosure held water, and formed a pond 180 acres in area. And the little rocky knoll, upon which the pyramid stands, became a little rocky island.

    The Construction Process

    Try to envision, if you will, the rocky knoll high above the Nile before a single block was set. It must have been a bleak, bare, gray mound of limestone. It was not flat. The perimeter had to be levelled off to create a base for the first row of casing stones. To use the water, it must be caught. The simplest device to catch it is a ditch. Once a ditch was cut in the location of the first row of casing stones and filled with water, it formed a perfect device for a levelling operation. Water would pour from the ditch at the lowest contour of the rock. This lowest contour determined the elevation of the base. Five hundred chisellers could be put to work at one time and whack the perimeter of the base down to a uniform level. The still water in the ditch would be their gauge, and simplify surveying operations.

    The next step would be to move the casing stones from the quarry across the river up to the base of the prepared building site of the Great Pyramid. How would you bring 16 ton stones from across the river, that are already on barges, up to the site of the Great Pyramid? A site with subterranean cuttings that are a hydraulic ram pump. Evidence indicates that a series of water locks from the Nile to the building site were created to move the stones up from the river to the building site. The locks worked just as the water locks work in the Panama Canal. The subterranean cuttings that are a colossal hydraulic ram pump supplied the needed water to operate the locks.

    Comparatively recent excavations have exposed the cutting of a giant rock-hewn stairway with huge risers, ascending from the basin near the Nile River to the top of the knoll. This cutting has the basic characteristics of the remains of a series of water-locks, although every relic that would indicate water-locks is gone. The accepted explanation for this cutting was to extract blocks for structural use in the pyramids. I never believed this explanation because the cutting is too precise, too neat, and too regular. If the ancients were quarrying blocks alone, the sides, the treads, and the risers would have been left rough and uneven.

    As they are today, these stairs are too wide to be of practical use as water-locks, but if a wall were built in the centre of the steps, dividing the stairway in two, the result would be two narrower sets of stairs. If appropriate masonry were placed in this divided stairway with pairs of water-gates made of wooden planks, the locks would be complete. When water was pumped into the locks they would have been ready to take stone laden barges up one set of locks, while the empty barges came down through the other. I believe that this stairway of locks is part of the 60 foot roadway described by Herodotus.

    The completion of the first course of casing stones formed a rectangular enclosure in which water could be impounded, forming a pool or artificial pond. Once this pool was created, barges with the rough interior stones were brought up the locks into the pool and put in place with remarkable ease. The block was moved into place by workers wading waist high in a pool of water. When the block was in position, the water level was lowered, which set the stone gently down on the floor of the pool. When this pool was filled with the rough interior stones, the next course of casing stones were brought up and placed above the previous course of casing stones. This created a higher pool of water. Barges with rough interior stones were brought up the locks and put in place with remarkable ease, until that pool was filled. A 16 ton casing stone or even a large 40 ton monolithic block could be moved and set as gently as a mother lays her sleeping babe in a crib. This simple process continued, step by step, course by course, level by level, until the Great Pyramid was completed!

    The workers moved the stones into the correct position on special barges. Then the water in the pool was lowered, gently lowering the stone in place. The barges were such that when the stone was lowered into place the barge could be removed from the stone, similar to a modern day forklift. With the use of water as a powerful and easily controlled lifting medium, the massive weight and size of the stones created no problems. Using the largest casing stones possible is a measure of economy. Large stones mean less quarrying work and finishing of the faces. The same is true for the rough cut stones one sees now that the casing stones have been removed. Since moving the stones to the building site is the least labour intensive part of the construction, the use of very large stones makes the job easier.

    It is interesting to note that the sides of the Great Pyramid “bend inward.” Or to put it another way, the sides of the Great Pyramid have a concave crease from the apex down to the centre of the base of each side. The Great Pyramid of Giza actually has eight sides. This was vital because of the hydrostatic pressure of the water inside the pyramid during construction. The Great Pyramid is the only pyramid in the world with this characteristic. This feature must have made the design and construction more difficult, but it was a must. Each side bends inward against the pressure of the water inside of the pyramid just as a dam like Hoover Dam bends towards the force of the water it holds back. The casing stones have precision joints that are cemented together to make the exterior of the Great Pyramid water tight. This was not to keep the pesky Egyptian rain out, but to hold water in during construction.

    According to Herodotus: “… they raised the remaining stones to their places by means of machines formed of short wooden planks. The first machine raised them from the ground to the top of the first step, on this there was another machine, which received the stone on its arrival, and conveyed it to the second step, whence a third machine advanced it still higher.” Another translator of Herodotus offers this translation: “They made it first in the shape of stairs, and lifted up the stones that remained with engines made of short timbers. From the ground they raised them to the first range of stairs; when the stone came up to this, it was set in another engine that stood on the first range, and drawn up from this to the second range; and thence by another engine to the third, for there were as many engines as there were ranges of stairs . . .” In the first, the word “machine” is used, while in the second, the word, “engine.” But the gist of the translations are identical.

    In modern usage, the words ‘engine’ and ‘machine’ are often used synonymously. And it may be here that in the translation of the ancient Greek the meaning of these two words are even more closely allied. For example, the dictionary defines the word catapult as “an ancient engine of war.” By a physicist’s definition, a catapult is not an engine of war, but a machine of war. An engine uses fuel directly to make it go. More than a hundred years ago, the US state of Ohio built an elaborate system of canals. Even today, in the vicinity of Akron, Ohio, century old water-locks are in operation. Nowadays, pleasure craft pass through them. The lock-gates are made of wooden planks about eight feet long. These locks are truly machines. They are water elevators and a floating body can be raised or lowered in them. They are made of stone andshort wooden planks. I believe that the machines Herodotus described were a series of water-locks. Elsewhere in the same volume he tells of seeing an old dry-dock that was used by King Necos to repair damaged war vessels. Think of this: How can anyone build a dry-dock and not use a water-lock? It cannot be done.

    The construction of the Great Pyramid continues. Upon the completion of each level, the next level above was assembled on the level before it. But how are the massive blocks moved up to ever greater heights as the construction progresses? As each level was completed, a water lock was built to move the blocks up to the next level. These series of locks moved blocks up the north face of the pyramid, one lock per level, all the way to the top. When the top of the pyramid was completed, the top lock was not needed. That lock was removed and the casing stones put in place. Small stones and rubble were placed in the area of the removed lock by hand. If solid close fitting stones were used then the water from the pump could not supply water to the rest of the locks below the top lock. Each lock was removed and replaced with casing stones from the top to the bottom with small stones and rubble placed in the area of the locks. Herodotus says he was told the pyramid was finished from the top, downward. To this day one can see along the north face where small stones and rubble fill the location of the series of locks.

    Most have heard the legends and myths that tell the stones were levitated into place by some unknown force. Some fables speak of the stones being somehow floated to their destination. These stories from distant past, lacking detail, do speak great truth. Even though this description is brief and abbreviated, you now know the answer to the riddle of the ages! You know how the Great Pyramid was built! No massive ramps almost the size of the pyramid itself. No sweated brow or tortured back. No multitudes of slaves harnessed like animals heaving to the crack of the whip. No aliens from distant worlds. Just workers wading waist deep in cool pools of water. Men moving barges, operating valves, locks and pumps under the watchful eye of talented Ancient Engineers.

    Building the Great Pyramid was not an exercise of oppression by a ruthless Pharaoh. Building the Great Pyramid was a snap! Its construction was an orderly, systematic, inventive and wondrous, piece of cake. But why build it? WHY? What was its purpose? Was it a tomb to be used once by an all powerful ruler? Was it built as a sacred place for those initiated in secret societies of higher wisdom to perform unknown rites? Was it somehow an observatory to view the stars? Was it built as prophecy in stone to confirm Biblical prophecies? What is the meaning of the mysterious interior chambers and passages? Is it a power source that we do not understand? Is it a temple, tomb or machine? The answer to why the Great Pyramid was built is the subject of the second half of this series to be published in the next issue of New Dawn.
    [alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 54.[/alert]

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  • Jonestown: Dismantling the Disinformation

    Jonestown: Dismantling the Disinformation

    From New Dawn 53 (Mar-Apr 1999)

    Do you know how or why close to a thousand people died at Jonestown, Guyana on November 18, 1978? Has anyone ever told you a remotely coherent story? In the following, Laurie Kahalas, a People’s Temple survivor, presents us with an account of the events from an insider’s perspective. Her book, Snake Dance: Unravelling the Mysteries of Jonestown, is one of the most significant works on the subject published on the subject.

    My name is Laurie Efrein Kahalas, and I was with the Peoples Temple for eight-and-a-half years. I was living in the Temple building in San Francisco when tragedy struck, along with a tiny crew left back in the States for organisational work. While others were wildly shredding documents, I quietly saved them, squireling away documents and files for a later, brighter day. There was nothing there that could incriminate us (for indeed, we were not criminals at all, we were humanitarians); and I realised I held in my hands the keys to some day exculpate my friends. As if such a thing could be possible! But I vowed to try.

    I am here to humanise the events at Jonestown, or as the Preface of Snake Dance: Unravelling the Mysteries of Jonestown, says: “To be fully human in the face of infamy.” The world spent so much time demonising Jim Jones, there was none left to humanise the people of Jonestown, or to comprehend the terror of their plight.

    What was the real story? Were the elements human, political, circumstantial? Preventable, not preventable? Were there demons, villains, heroes?

    In fairness to researchers, it has been next to impossible to research, in thatJonestown was one of the worst cases of yellow journalism in the entire history of the American media. It all began with the power of the press.

    All “research” goes back to the “original sources,” an unseemly amalgam of three components: 1) Ex-member plants in the group; 2) their non-member government-based handlers; and 3) the tiniest handful of aggrieved ex-members who were used as pawns. Of the ex-member group who did not have the earmarks of being government plants, most lost relatives in the tragedy.

    The horrendous mass death at Jonestown burst onto the world press in November, 1978, complete with gory details and fingers of blame. Although it was breaking news, all the background, the analyses, the witnesses, the media heroes, were ready-made for the press; nor was there any other candidate for blame but Jim Jones. The people at Jonestown were “brainwashed”; their defenders “apologists”; the only “credible sources” were the people who had “exposed” Peoples Temple a year and more prior to the tragedy.

    We say we know the crushing power of the press, but no one knows that in full measure until you experience a Jonestown. So intense and widespread was the deluge, that it never even occurred to those within the press to question whether it may have been the very same people so intent upon destroying the church’s reputation, who had moved to destroy Jonestown physically.

    The most notorious precursor of such methods was the Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels, who advised laying down a barrage of bad press to indoctrinate the Germans into exterminating the Jews. “Repeat a lie often enough and people will believe it.” With Peoples Temple, it was rendered all too easy, for the group had virtually relocated thousands of miles away, leaving no viable voice to defend the church.

    At first, it seemed a great shock, for the church had been “the toast of the town,” for its humanitarian service work. A mere six months before Jim Jones’ exodus to Guyana, a Testimonial Dinner featured plaques of commendation from the Mayor of San Francisco, the City Council, the State Senate, and accolades from the Lieutenant Governor, the Police Commissioner, Assemblyman Willie Brown (now Mayor of San Francisco) and many others. Yet in the very first smear, in New West, a fledgling Murdoch publication, a 25-year record of humanitarian service was merely held up, then dumped in the trash, in favour of “What is going on behind closed doors”?

    Although Jonestown was the church’s crown jewel accomplishment, an acclaimed breakaway from the inner cities of the United States, with their racism, unemployment, drugs, crimes, substandard housing and more, the destroyers merely used people who had never even been to Jonestown as “sources,” and began with “Jonestown: Paradise or Prison?” From that time forward, until the arrival of reporters at the end, no reporter had ever visited Jonestown, yet horror stories from the most suspect people were all the mainstream press would print. By the time the reporters arrived, they had been so manipulated to suspect the worst, they actually wrote that they thought it “odd” that black and white, young and old, were singing and swaying together, and that “I wondered if they had been drugged or hypnotised”! Another reporter broke into a senior women’s residence, saw bunk beds (for building individual cottages was ongoing for a large exodus), and concluded “It looked like a slave ship.”

    Who lay the groundwork for the Congressman and the press to come to Jonestown? Who led Congressman Ryan into what turned out to be a death trap? More pointedly, who was it who set that trap for him, and how can we be sure?

    Jonestown Targeted by Agent Provocateurs

    It is time to examine the “valiant crusaders” who “exposed” Peoples Temple in the press and forced the investigatory visit to Jonestown.

    Their leaders were a combination of agency plants and provocateurs, as directed by their non-member government handlers. A year-and-a-half smear campaign preceded the tragedy, destroying an acclaimed church in absentia, during which time the Murdoch and Hearst presses blacked out any dissent.

    Moreover, no one was who they said they were, and their stated motives were “cover stories,” not fact. The story was not “courageous ex-members who dared to step forward,” but rather the tiniest handful of vindictive ex-members with suspect personal motives, being used by people with a far-right-wing political agenda.

    The leaders of the parade, Elmer and Deanna Mertle (a/k/a Jeannie and Al Mills), were right-wing extremists,veterans of the notorious John Birch Society; and Timothy Stoen, veteran of clandestine spying missions into East Berlin in the early sixties. The Mertles were murdered in February 1980 in their home in Berkeley, California, by people the police surmised “they knew,” for there were no signs of forced entry or burglary. The killings of these two, and their daughter Daphene were done very professionally – dum-dum bullets, “execution style,” and leaving no traceable clues.

    Most tellingly, they were murdered a mere five days after announcing they no longer wanted to speak out against Peoples Temple! Their murders prevented them from posing a life-long liability… but for whom?

    Timothy Stoen, former top attorney for the church, and founder of the “Concerned Relatives” group, had no relatives in Jonestown, but aggressively pushed his slander factory to bring Congressman Ryan to Jonestown on false pretences. He deliberately and knowingly pressed a false paternity claim to Jim Jones’ own child, repeatedly threatening to send in mercenaries, as recorded in newspaper editorials and State Department logs. A previous mercenary attack against the community came within a few days after his attorneys had travelled to Jonestown to serve legal papers, with the implicit threat: “Release the child or else violence will ensue.” To justify ongoing threats of violence against defenceless families, Stoen meanwhile persuaded Deborah Layton, an ex-member who swore to many lies, to claim that she had personally seen “hundreds of guns,” although both Guyanese and American authorities later discovered all of thirty-nine – .22 calibre and none automatic. These people were transparently defenceless.

    Within two weeks of the tragedy, Stoen bragged that he would “destroy Jonestown,” and specifically that he was “counting on Jim [Jones] to overreact.” As America viewed on screen through one of its major networks, ABC, Congressman Ryan addressed the community of Jonestown saying, “I hear many of you saying that this is the best thing that’s ever happened to you!”, leaving any motive for assassinating him quite thin. It seems quite unbelievable that a Congressional visit alone, much less a positive one, could possibly create such an “overreaction.” Stoen surely knew that his “concentration camp” charges could not stick, so to what would Jim Jones “overreact”? A mere visit? Or an assassination?

    It was also Stoen who was later exposed as the one who had continually tried to pushed a non-violent church onto a terrorist course (called an “agent provocateur”), it was Stoen who made all the threats against Jonestown, and it was Stoen who led Congressman Ryan into Jonestown on false pretenses. More tellingly even, Stoen had secretly been a far-right-wing zealot all along, and Congressman Leo Ryan was known to be the most vocal anti-CIA Congressman in the entire United States Congress! We want to bear this in mind when we ponder what is known about the assassination.

    Stoen, who had been living communally and was now visibly unemployed, spent huge sums of money on lobbying in Washington, cross-continent travel, and it was discovered that he had several secret bank accounts in foreign countries where the church had done no banking at all.

    Other key movers and shakers in the ongoing campaign had never been members at all – not of Peoples Temple, anyway. More like “membership” in the Treasury Department, Interpol, and some deadringers for ties with both FBI and CIA. Most notable were two shadowy characters by the names of David Conn and Joseph Mazor.

    David Conn admitted being close friends with the Mertles all the years they were members, and moreover, of “investigating” the church throughout that time. He claimed he was concerned about “black people being ripped off.” (Note: In point of fact, Jim Jones was such a careful steward of the people’s money, Tim Stoen never even made such a charge). Yet he went to Native American leader Dennis Banks, and tried to blackmail him into turning against Jim Jones, or be sent back to his death in a South Dakota prison! So the cover story about caring about minorities was definitely false! Moreover, Conn had bragged to Banks about his ties to the US Treasury Department, which works closely with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and two other sources confirmed Conn as a Treasury Department agent.

    Joseph Mazor, who was discovered to be a member of Interpol, housed adjacent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington, was an admitted felon, who was mysteriously granted a State investigator’s license fresh out of prison for passing bogus checks – just in time to investigate Peoples Temple! He admitted orchestrating the smear campaign against the church, stating that his employers were outsiders, never members of the church, and he refused to reveal their identities or the source of his funding. Mazor was later to “claim credit for” the mercenary attack against Jonestown, and travelled there to announce that the original plan of the attack had beenmass extermination. A community which was already isolated and defenceless now feared the worst – and just weeks before the Congressman arrived!

    Influential & Powerful Voice for the Oppressed

    What were the motives behind the smears in the press? Peoples Temple Christian Church performed all the work of the church, caring for the poor, the needy, and the disadvantaged. But we were also interracial. We were socialist. Our leader had a powerful, influential voice. Although we had become a political forum for every left-wing leader, advocate, or cause of the day, we were gaining ground in the mainstream. We were even planning to re-relocate to the then-Soviet Union during the Cold War. We “had to be stopped.”

    Following the tragedy, Joseph Mazor who, like the others, had never revealed any political motivation for opposing the church, now stated flatly, “It was considered that Jim Jones would become a major political force in the Caribbean within five years.” It was patently clear that despite the church’s ongoing non-violence, they feared a new Castro in the Caribbean. An American Castro, with citizens free to enter and exit the States at will. Was it possible for the CIA to not be interested in such an international scenario?

    And who else might the CIA have an interest in wanting to “stop”? The CIA’s main gadfly at that time was one Leo Ryan, the slain Congressman, who had passed the Hughes/Ryan Bill of 1974, requiring the CIA to report all covert operations to Congress. Indeed, both Jim Jones and Leo Ryan, both threats to the CIA, wound up dead? “Coincidence”?

    In any case, we were indeed “stopped” from either any proliferation in the Caribbean, or a move to the then-Soviet Union, in the most tragic manner possible. Yet all the public was ever told was that Peoples Temple was a bizarre violent cult with an insane leader. “Bizarre murder/suicide ritual” was the mantra of the day. Politics was never mentioned.

    But it was more. If the story had been exactly as told, it could be left alone. But it never was. Cover-ups and disinformation were, of necessity, rampant. This is, indeed, what has most complicated the present-day task of telling what really happened at Jonestown. The rumour mill has been so widespread, one has to contend with not just facts, but an ingrained belief system, that has all the earmarks of itself being a “cult.” People who want to believe that “Jim Jones was CIA,” or “Jonestown was a secret CIA mind control experiment,” or “Jonestown was MK Ultra,” have been more daunting to contend with than people who have simply been uninformed.

    No one has ever considered that the disinformation pervading the aftermath of the Jonestown tragedy was perpetuated because Leo Ryan was so known to his aides to be anti-CIA, that to ward off a direct investigation of the CIA for assassinating Ryan, they have to concoct Jim Jones must have been CIA! If even madness has method, here is the simple key to the false and unverified barrage of accusations about Jonestown being a secret CIA mind control experiment and the like. Just blame Jim Jones and call it CIA. If the CIA really did it, no one given that absolutely false clue could ever trace it to the source. It was deliberately designed by dead-end specialists to lead nowhere.

    This is what has led to the current approach of dismantling the disinformation. It has not been possible to speak the truth without first dismantling the fabric of lies spread to date, and clarifying whythose lies have been spread: their origin, their rationale, their intended purpose. One must first strip awaydisinformation before having any capacity to see.

    Jonestown NOT a CIA Experiment

    I want to dismantle the most rampant disinformation first: the absolute lie that “Jim Jones was CIA.” Jim Jones would have rather had his eyes gouged out. It was both the measure of, and admittedly, the danger of his character, that rather than do that, he would die. He was the most mission-driven individual I have ever met in my entire life.

    Jonestown was NOT a mind control experiment in the mould of “MK Ultra.” I personally do not doubt that the CIA might have been glad to use Jonestown as such had they the chance. I am not attempting, understand, to exonerate the CIA! Indeed, I see their footprints all over this disaster. But the mind control experiment story is disinformation 100%.

    Jonestown was a beautiful, productive, thriving interracial community, acclaimed as a “paradise,” which was the happiest and most fulfilling life that most of its largely-inner city residents had ever known. It was a shining model of how inner city dwellers can thrive and excel on a worldwide stage. It was described by visitors as “a paradise,” “a superior society,” “like coming to another planet,” and ” a credit to humanity.”

    The media who were so eager to smear Jonestown had not even visited! When Congressman Ryan finally did visit, his commentary to the assemblage was that “I hear many of you saying that this is the best thing that has ever happened to you. What is being done here is of great significance, even on a worldwide basis.” Obviously, their was no motive for Jonestown residents to assassinate someone who intended to bring back a good report.

    Events Leading Up to the Tragedy

    I want to approach the catastrophe in two stages: first the assassination at the Port Kaituma airstrip, then the deaths at Jonestown.

    First, the reader must realise that this matter was never brought to a court of law. Members of the Jonestown community were convicted of the assassination in the press, naming Jim Jones as the mastermind who “ordered” the assassination. This was accomplished not only with no incriminating evidence, but with considerable exculpatory evidence that was never considered. These were the many factors:

    There were no forensics done on the Congressman; no match-up of bullets against guns. Indeed, the assassination was reportedly done with dum-dum bullets, which explode upon impact, rendering them untraceable, and which were beyond the technical capabilities of anyone at Jonestown to manufacture.

    The so-called “eyewitness identifications” were bogus – made by (according to the Congressional investigators) Jim Cobb, a man who was not only suing us for millions of dollars at the time, but who did not even know many of the alleged attackers (they had joined the church after he left), admitted being “on the other side of the plane when the shooting started,” and then fled for his own life in the other direction! He never even had the shooters in his line of vision!

    There were virtually no autopsies done – all of seven, and of even those, the bodies were embalmed before being shipped back to the medical team in the United States! An American doctor lamented that they had not even verified poisoning in a single case! That it would have been very simple – just a little blood or urine, but that with all the hundreds of bodies, it was not done on a single one. Shipments of the dead were nearly not accepted because there had been no death certificates prepared. No one even went to collect the bodies until they had been laying out three days in the tropical sun.

    A key piece of evidence did emerge unexpectedly: an on-site film of the assassination had been taken by Bob Brown, an NBC photojournalist who was then himself shot. I first saw this film at the first anniversary of the tragedy in 1979. I was alarmed to see a sophisticated military formation, identified for me as “a squad diamond”, not at all within the capability of Peoples Temple. The killings looked very professional, and indeed, Bob Flick, a reporter on site, described the killings as “calm, silent, brutal, methodical” and that the attack had been “carefully planned and mercilessly executed.”

    At the time, I went to the Congressional investigating committee to demand they blow up the film to confirm that it was not anyone from Jonestown who killed the Congressman. They refused, deliberately botched my transcript, and when I tried to mail the information to the 34 Congressmen on the committee in Washington, only two of my return mailing receipts came back stamped!

    I had neither the clout nor the connections to obtain the film at the time, but now at the twentieth anniversary, it has resurfaced, as have other pieces of evidence perhaps considered less dangerous by this late date. I currently have a source in possession of the film, and confirming military opinion that this was a “diamond formation,” and a thoroughly professional “hit.”

    Yet the bias in the United States press continues to the degree that snippets of that film have been played on several television stations, and no one even commented that the shooters were all dressed alike – in Army uniforms!Perhaps the truth, flagrant as it is, may yet surface through the simple channels of common sense.

    Next is that the assassins did not arrive on the Temple truck. They barrelled on in a second vehicle, as all eyewitnesses confirmed. They were somehow able to rapidly and skilfully disarm the Guyanese police on site before opening fire on the Congressman and his party.

    What of the charge that “Jim Jones ordered the assassination”? What was released publicly of “the final tape” made at Jonestown, however severely spliced and abbreviated it was, is unequivocal on that point again and again. Indeed, the identity of the killers was completely unknown to Jim Jones:

    1) “I didn’t order the shooting”;

    2) “I don’t know who shot the Congressman.”;

    3) “I can’t control these people [who did].”;

    4) “I waited against all evidence… I tried to prevent all this from happening.”;

    5) “I wish I could call it back.”;

    6) “I never wanted to kill anybody.”;

    7) “How many are dead?… Oh, God Almighty, God help them…”

    A letter written to Congress and the President months earlier, had predicted exactly what would happen:

    “All that has been done is to get people to believe in society… Our people had been so alienated. All that they can see in this is a set-up, a classic scenario: first muddy our name… whip up attacks in the press, and then: by the time you reach the classic ending, the frame-ups, the ‘kill,’ no one even cares. …And they think that the press has already done its job with slander and smears, and so no-one will care about the frame-ups…”

    Yet when the moment of truth was upon the people of Jonestown, the chaos and confusion was so thick, that panic about an invading force had taken over. Tragically, contingencies had been discussed long since, following the mercenary attack in September, 1977. This was a community that was geographically trapped, militarily defenceless, and so remote and isolated, it did not even have a phone to alert the world or call in help. The great majority of residents had vowed to never be forced back to the inner cities of the United States. The previous military attack had happened in broad daylight, when they were peaceably going about their daily business. Now it was the wake of the assassination of a Congressman, heading towards the middle of the night. How much greater the peril! Thus, when Jim Jones told his assembled community that forces would be closing in for a slaughter, it seemed all too real.

    Moreover, Port Kaituma, the location of the airstrip assassination, was seven miles from Jonestown, so no one reported the men in Army uniforms had assassinated the Congressman! But even had they known, that would have heightened the danger, not diminished it.

    In my book, Snake Dance: Unravelling the Mysteries of Jonestown, I lay out all the possible post-assassination scenarios whose perpetrators must at all cost cover up. Although I was horrified at the suicides, I am still haunted to this day, what might have happened had they simply waited out the night. Life is precious, and any life that could have been saved would be precious, whatever the overall carnage. But carnage there would have been. There would have to have been carnage to cover their tracks and eliminate anyone with an alibi, differing version, or questions about a frame.

    As for the people of Jonestown, they would have been thrilled to survive and live on. They took their own lives not because they were drugged or brainwashed or robots. They genuinely and legitimately feared a slaughter from outside forces.

    I know what happened will be controversial forever; and I wept, especially over the loss of children, more times over more years than I can easily admit. But I loved these people, and what has bruised my heart along with the deaths, is the injustice of what happened, that the truth was never told, and that no one has ever spoken on their behalf. They were a role model for how inner city dwellers could thrive and excel on a worldwide stage. They were brave, wonderful pioneers, who deserve far better than to be labelled as “brainwashed,” “robots,” or even “psychopaths.”

    Moreover, who will ever dare another Jonestown? Who will break away in self-empowerment and overcome the many social problems which beset minorities in the United States? More than those people were killed. They killed off a hope.

    Many people do not care that a thousand people, largely minority and poor, died in some remote jungle. Yet in pressing this matter in the States, I have to assume that people care that the assassination of a United States Congressman was a frame-up, blamed on the wrong people, done to provoke mass death, and that there are many ways this can be proven. We do have an unfortunate record in tracking down the truth about assassinations. Witness John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcom X, Bobby Kennedy, and others. But life has put me here, and I take it as a commitment, even an honour, that I can speak for my fallen friends. I have never doubted that it is the right thing to do.

    These were people who lived with good cause. From radiant health to beautiful cottages, to a wonderful community school, burgeoning medical facilities, fabulous home-grown food, creative, fulfilling employment, self-empowerment, freedom from all the scourges of poverty, drugs and crime…. and most especially, to harmony between the races, ages, genders, economic classes, the people of Jonestown had an incredible life, a “future life” they treasured. Next to you or me, most of us, and certainly society as a whole, they lived with good, even valiant cause. That is much of why they were put in that position – “that position” being their backs up against the wall! Whether the world will ever comprehend how they met their deaths, it is time to honour the example and sacrifice of their lives.

    As for me, I vowed not to live my life as a victim over this, and I am not. I do not live in shame. And in my heart, if not in the eyes of the world all these years, my friends who died at Jonestown do not live on in shame either. Jim Jones? I knew him when he was strong and vibrant, before the deteriorations of illness. He was the most passionate, committed champion for racial and economic equality that I have ever seen or known. He was by nature a pacifist, and only slowly, through extreme trials, did his mettle snap. Was he unbalanced? Of course! How do you live under such threats, and the descent of such a doom (not to mention terminal illness!), without extreme reactions? I am brutally honest in my book about organisational problems, my own conflicts, and Jim Jones’ overbearing, sometimes ruthless personality. But I know he loved those people, and that his very heart would burst rather than wilfully inflict that kind of pain.

    The final words on “the final tape” were perhaps as redeeming for a community that was unfailingly peace-loving, as they were tragic:

    “They are not taking our lives. We are not taking their lives. We are laying down our lives in protest against conditions of an inhumane world. We are a thousand people who don’t like the way the world is.”

    I don’t much like the way the world is either, though perhaps not in quite the same way, and certainly not with the same remedy. It does not make me want to die. It makes me want to live. To create a future where such travesties as what was done to Jonestown never again happen. Where it is not only accepted, but nurtured and encouraged, for people to live together in peace – all races, all religions, all ages, all backgrounds, in harmony and acceptance of one another. Let us do it, and not have to face a slaughter for the trying. I don’t want to see any more “Jonestowns of death.” But I would be thrilled to see more communities in this, our troubled world, with that calibre of life. Let us, Humanity, learn from experience. Finally. Please.

    Laurie Efrein Kahalas’ book is Snake Dance: Unravelling the Mysteries of Jonestown.

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