From Atlantis to the Sphinx (37 page)

He was curious to know whether there was any archaeological evidence that man indulged in seasonal (he calls them ‘time factored’) activities like agriculture in the days ‘before civilisation’.

At this point, he became fascinated by strange markings on pieces of bone dating from the Stone Age. Under a microscope, he could see that they were made with many different tools, which indicated that they were not made, at the same time. He finally reached the conclusion that one series of marks forming a curved line on a 35,000-year-old bone were notations of the phases of the moon. Which meant that, in a sense, Cro-Magnon man had invented ‘writing’.

But why? Why should he care about the movements of the sun and moon? To begin with, because he was intelligent—as intelligent as modern man. He probably regarded himself as highly civilised, just as we do. And an intelligent person needs a sense of time, of history. Marshack mentions a ‘calendar stick’ of the Pima Indians of America, which represents their history over 44 years. This means that the Indian ‘story teller’ could take the stick, point out some distant year, and recount its history—represented by dots or spirals or other faint marks. Cro-Magnon man of 35,000 years ago would probably have done much the same thing.

And then, of course, a calendar would be useful to hunters, telling them when the deer or other prey would be returning. It would be useful to pregnant women who wanted to know when they were due to give birth. In fact, a calendar is one of the basic needs of civilisation, the equivalent of modern man’s digital watch.

But of course, we are forgetting another vital factor. If Schwaller is correct, Cro-Magnon man was interested in the sun and moon for another reason: because he was sensitive to their rhythms, and experienced them as living forces. Today, even the most sceptical scientist acknowledges the influence of the moon on mental patients; any doctor who has worked in a hospital will verify that certain patients are affected by the full moon. Yet compared to aboriginal peoples, civilised man has lost most of his sensitivity to nature.

If we want to understand our Cro-Magnon ancestors, then we have to try to imagine human beings who are as sensitive to the sun, moon and other natural forces (like earth magnetism) as a mental patient is to the full moon.

In
The Roots of Civilisation
, Marshack comments: ‘Though in the Upper Palaeolithic explanations were by story and via image and symbol, there was a high intelligence, cognition, rationality, knowledge and technical skill involved.’
²
In other words, Stone Age man possessed all the abilities needed to create civilisation.

And yet although he was poised on the brink of civilisation 35,000 years ago, living in a community sufficiently sophisticated to need a knowledge of astronomy, we are asked to believe that it actually took him another 25,000 years before he began to take the first hesitant steps towards building the earliest cities.

It sounds, on the whole, rather unlikely.

In his bafflingly obscure book,
The White Goddess
, the poet Robert Graves puts forward a view that is in total accord with Marshack’s conclusions. He argues that worship of the moon goddess (the ‘white goddess’) was the original universal religion of mankind, which was supplanted at a fairly late stage by worship of the sun god Apollo, whom he regards as a symbol of science and rationality—that is, of left-brain knowledge, as opposed to the right-brain intuition that he associates with the goddess.

Graves explains that he was reading Lady Charlotte Guest’s translation of the Welsh epic
The Mabinogion
when he came upon an incomprehensible poem called ‘The Song of Taliesin’. Suddenly he knew (‘don’t ask me how’) that the lines were a series of mediaeval riddles, to which he knew the answers. He also knew (‘by inspiration’) that the riddles were linked with a Welsh tradition about a Battle of the Trees, which was actually about a struggle between two Druid priesthoods for the control of learning.

The Druid alphabet was a closely guarded secret, but its eighteen letters were the names of trees, whose consonants stood for the months of which the trees were characteristic, and the vowels for the positions of the sun, with its equinoxes and solstices. The ‘tree calendar’ was in use throughout Europe and the Middle East in the Bronze Age, and was associated with the Triple Moon Goddess.

This cult, says Graves, was slowly repressed by ‘the busy rational cult of the Solar God Apollo, who rejected the Orphic tree-alphabet in favour of the commercial Phoenician alphabet—the familiar ABC—and initiated European literature and science.’

Graves’s idea supports Anne Macaulay’s notion that the modern alphabet was associated with Apollo. It also supports many of the suggestions made in the last chapter about the ‘magical’ mentality of Cro-Magnon man, which has slowly given way to the ‘bicameral’ mind of today.

According to Graves, he did not have to ‘research’
The White Goddess
in the normal sense; he had it ‘thrust upon him’. And what was ‘thrust upon him’ was a whole
knowledge system
that is based upon a mentality that is totally different from our own—upon ‘lunar’ rather than ‘solar’ premises.

And this, clearly, is also what Schwaller is attempting to outline in books like
Sacred Science
, and helps to explain their obscurity: he is trying to describe a remote and forgotten vision of reality in a language that is totally unsuited to it.

The mention of ancient calendars inevitably reminds us of the famous Mayan calendar which, as Graham Hancock points out, is far more accurate than the modern Gregorian calendar. Hancock quotes an archaeologist asking why the Maya created such an incredibly accurate calendar, but failed to grasp the principle of the wheel. We know, of course, that the Maya inherited their calendar from the Olmecs of a thousand years earlier, but that only shifts the emphasis of the question to why the Olmecs failed to grasp the principle of the wheel.

Hancock suggests that the answer may be that the Maya—and the Olmecs—did not invent the calendar: they inherited it—exactly the suggestion that Schwaller de Lubicz made to explain the sophistication of Egyptian science. All the evidence we have considered so far indicates that they are correct.

Which still leaves us with the question: why should anyone
want
such an accurate calendar?

One intriguing possibility has been suggested by a modern researcher named Maurice Cotterell, in a book called
The Mayan Prophecies
(coauthored with Adrian Gilbert, Robert Bauval’s collaborator on
The Orion Mystery
).

Cotterell is an engineer and computer scientist who became interested in scientific aspects of astrology. When in the merchant navy, he noticed that his colleagues on board ship seemed to behave in ways that corresponded with their astrological signs—that ‘fire’ signs
are
more aggressive than ‘water’ signs, and so on.

Now in fact, a statistician named Michel Gauquelin had already raised this question, and published a study indicating that there is genuine statistical evidence for certain propositions of astrology, such as that more scientists and doctors are born under the sign of Mars, and that more politicians and actors are born under Jupiter. A sceptical psychologist, Dr Hans Eysenck, was open-minded enough to look at these results, and dismayed his colleagues by publicly admitting that they seemed to be sound. Eysenck then went on to work with an astrologer named Jeff Mayo, and they studied two huge samples of subjects chosen at random to see whether people born under ‘fire’ signs (Aries, Leo, Sagittarius) and ‘air’ signs (Gemini, Libra, Aquarius) are more extroverted than people born under ‘earth’ (Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn) and ‘water’ (Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces) signs. And although the odds against it were 10,000 to 1, the statistics involving around 4,000 people showed that it was indeed so.

Cotterell wanted to know how this could be. Is there some cosmic factor that changes from month to month to explain this puzzling result? The signs of the zodiac (Aries, Taurus, etc) are called ‘sun’ signs because the sun rises against a background of different constellations each month. But obviously, the constellations cannot influence individuals—they are light-years away; it is a mere figure of speech to say our fate is written in the stars, for they are merely the figures on a clock that enable us to tell the time.

On the other hand, the sun does something that has considerable influence on the earth; this great roaring furnace sends out a continuous stream of energy, which causes the tails of comets to stream out behind them like flags in the wind. It also has variations known as sunspots, which are huge magnetic flares that can cause radio interference on Earth. They send out a ‘solar wind’ of magnetic particles which cause the Aurora Borealis.

Cotterell decided to start with the reasonable assumption that it may be the magnetic field of the sun that affects human embryos—particularly sunspot activity.

Because the sun is made of plasma—superheated gas—it does not rotate uniformly, like the earth; its equator rotates almost a third faster than its poles—26 days to a ‘turn’ as compared to 37. So its lines of magnetism get twisted, and sometimes stick out of the sun like bed-springs out of a broken mattress; these are ‘sunspots’.

Cotterell was excited to learn that the sun not only changes the type of radiation emitted every month, but that there are four
types
of solar radiation which follow one another in sequence. So the sun’s activities not only seem to correspond to the monthly astrological changes known as ‘sun signs’, but also to the four types of sign—fire, earth, air, water.

Because the earth is also revolving around the sun, a 26-day rotation of the sun takes 28 days as seen from Earth. The earth receives a shower of alternating negative and positive particles every seven days.

Biologists know that the earth’s weak magnetic field influences living cells and can affect the synthesis of DNA in the cells. So it seemed to Cotterell highly probable that changes in the sun’s magnetic field affect babies at the moment of conception. If so, he had discovered the scientific basis of astrology.

Astrologers to whom he explained his theory were dubious. According to astrology, it is the time of
birth
that affects us, not the moment of conception. Yet this hardly seems to make sense—after all, the baby has been alive for nine months at the time of birth. In fact, another scientist was already at work on a similar theory; in
The Paranormal: Beyond Sensory Science
(1992), physicist Percy Seymour suggests that the newly formed foetus is affected by the ‘magnetic web’ of the solar system, which stretches like a cat’s cradle between the sun, moon and planets. Cotterell was simply ignoring the moon and planets as unimportant.

When Cotterell was appointed to a job at the Cranfield Institute of Technology, he lost no time in feeding his data into its powerful computer. He wanted to plot the interaction of the sun’s two magnetic fields (due to its different speeds of rotation at the poles and equator) and the earth’s movement round the sun.

What came out of the computer was a graph that showed a definite rhythmic cycle every eleven and a half years. Astronomers have computed the sunspot ‘cycle’ at 11.1 years. So it looked as if Cotterell was getting close.

The sun’s two interacting magnetic fields come back to square one, so to speak, every 87.45 days, which Cotterell called a ‘bit’. Looking at his graph, he saw that the sunspot cycle repeats itself and goes back to square one every 187 years. But there is a further complication called the sun’s ‘neutral sheet’—the area around the equator where north and south balance out perfectly. This sheet is warped by the sun’s magnetic field, so it shifts by one ‘bit’ every 187 years, giving a total cycle—before it goes back to square one—of 18,139 years. And every 18,139 years, the sun’s magnetic field reverses.

This period, Cotterell could see, broke down into 97 periods of 187 years, consisting of five major cycles, three of 19 times 187, and two of 20 times 187.

It was when Cotterell noticed that 20 times 187 years amounts to 1,366,040 days that he became excited. He had become interested in one of the Mayan astronomical documents known as the
Dresden Codex
, which the Maya used to work out eclipses, as well as with the cycles of the planet Venus, to which they attached tremendous importance. The Maya declared that Venus was ‘born’ in the year 3114 BC, on 12 August. (We may recall that Immanuel Velikovsky, discussed in Chapter 5, believed that Venus had been ‘born’ out of Jupiter, and came close to the earth on its way to its present position.) The Mayas calculated using a complicated period called a
tzolkin
—260 days—and according to them, a full cycle of the planet Venus amounted to 1,366,560 days. This, Cotterell noticed, was the same as his number 1,366,040,
plus
two
tzolkins.

Was it possible, he wondered, that the Mayas had somehow stumbled on his recognition about sunspot cycles, and that their highly complex calendar was based on it?

There was something else that made him feel he might be on the right track. He had noted a rather curious fact—that the sun’s magnetic bombardment intensifies during periods of low activity in sunspot cycles. This seemed contradictory; surely you would expect it to be lower? The reason, he concluded, has to do with the belts of radiation around the earth known as the Van Allen belts, which were discovered by space scientist James Van Allen in 1958. These are due to the earth’s magnetic field, and they trap solar radiation, which would otherwise destroy life on earth.

Cotterell reasoned that the Van Allen belts become super-saturated with magnetic particles during periods of high sunspot activity, so reducing the amount of radiation that reaches Earth’s surface. In periods of low sunspot activity, they let the particles through. And, Cotterell believed, they cause infertility and other problems.

Cotterell was inclined to date the decline of the Maya from the year AD 627, when Earth was receiving maximum bombardment from sun magnetism. Now he realised that AD 627 was also the
end
of the Mayan cycle (of 1,366,560 days), starting from the ‘birth of Venus’ in 3114 BC. This was also the time the sun’s magnetic cycle reversed. The birth of Venus was the date of the previous reverse. Surely that could not be coincidence?