Grid of the Gods (20 page)

I
f astronomical alignments form one crucial component of the world grid of the gods, then
positioning
and mathematics form the other, and no two mathematical masters have delved more thoroughly into this aspect of the mystery of the global grid than have Carl Munck and John Michell, Munck by a thorough — indeed, one might say overwhelming — study of almost all sites on the grid and their unique placements and mathematical properties, and Michell by a Schwaller De Lubicz-like lifetime of study of the larger issues implied by sacred numbers and sacred geometry.

As was seen in the last chapter, however, there is evidence from the cosmologies depicted at Angkor Wat and the texts of Hermetic and Neoplatonic tradition, that we may be looking at a profound topological metaphor of the physical medium itself. There are in addition to these indicators, traditions long associated with such “power places” on the world grid, particularly in Europe and Great Britain.

Paul Devereux is an Englishman who, along with his “Dragon Project,” has been attempting to conduct scientific investigation into such locations on the grid where local tradition and lore ascribes paranormal occurrences to them, including attempts to investigate
the infrasonic and infrared properties of such places, which oftentimes returned anomalously high, or alternatively, low amounts of such sounds and radiations.
³
It should also be noted that Devereux and his research team often found that their readings of infrasound or infrared energies often
varied with the phases of the Moon, that is, in response to the wider celestial geometries
! Shades of Kozyrev!
⁴

Additionally, Devereux and his teams also discovered “noteworthy anomalies relating to background radioactivity and natural magnetism at certain monuments.”
⁵
But beyond these anomalous findings, there is the matter of tradition and rumors themselves:

Throughout the twentieth century, popular rumour has maintained that ancient sacred sites harbour strange powers. This belief has its origins in anecdotal reports of unusual happenings at such places, and centuries of folklore ascribing supernatural properties to old standing stones and mysterious earthworks.
⁶

In Devereux’s opinion, the ultimate source of these traditions comes from the ancient belief that “the earth was alive, with subtle but powerful forces flowing through its body, the land,” forces which concentrated themselves according to the “spirit of the place”, the
genius loci.
⁷

Accordingly, Devereux, more than most researchers of the world grid phenomenon and its ancient places, assembled a vast catalogue of traditions about such places, “in the hope that actual recall of the megalithic technology may be partially contained within it, however fragmented and distorted.”
⁸

A. Devereux and The Traditions of Places of Power
1. Moving and Immoveable Stones

One of the most persistent of these traditions is that movement, or, conversely, immovability, is attributed to the stones of such monuments. Stones were said to move to nearby brooks or rivers to drink, or alternatively, rise up at certain times of the day — in some cases heralded by the chiming of a nearby clock — or certain times of the year.
⁹
Alternatively, other traditions hold that certain stones cannot be moved at all or, “if they are so displaced, will either return automatically or else cause such problems that the person involved will obliged to return the stone, and will find it supernaturally easy to do so.”
¹⁰
One may, and should, of course, view such traditions with due skepticism for very obvious reasons.

But viewed a different way, these traditions are actually describing something having profoundly to do with
physics
and with the properties of mass and inertia. As will be seen shortly, Devereux is alive to the possibility that there may be a much deeper, and older tradition, of cosmology and physics at work in such legends. In short, one may be looking at a decayed and declined legacy in such traditions, one that at a much older time might have entailed explanations shorn of totemistic and shamanistic imagery.

2. Uncountable Stones and Stones of the Giants and Gods

Other local traditions — at least in Great Britain — hold that some of the stone henges and circles that dot its landscape are populated by stones that refuse all attempt to enumerate or count. Each time a person tries to count them, a different answer will obtain. Similarly, “Many megaliths or large natural boulders are said, in folklore, to have been placed in their positions by giants of old.”
¹¹
Stonehenge itself was once known as the Giants Dance,
¹²
and similarly, the stone circles of Sanguli in far-off Africa were said by local tribal traditions to be “built by ancient people who were eight
metres tall.”
¹³
Yet another famous megalithic site, Baalbek in Lebanon, whose thousand-ton-plus stone “trilithion,” was according to tradition said to have been built by Cain and an ancient giant race.
¹⁴
While this association of megalithic sites with giants is not universal, it does have echoes, as we shall see, in places as diverse as Meso-America, South America, and Egypt, where similar giant stone constructions are attributed to the gods or to the giants, or associated with them in some other fashion.

3. Desecration, Inhabitation, and Treasure Traditions

In other traditions, disturbing stones — in effect, desecrating them — are associated with various curses for doing so, among which are that the desecrator “can expect to be subjected to severe weather conditions such as freak winds or fierce electrical storms.”
¹⁵
In this case, notes Devereux, there are actually examples in the modern record of this actually happening:

In 1849, for instance, when Dean Merewether of Hereford and his team were digging at Silbury Hill near Avebury in Wiltshire, a ‘dramatic high Gothick thunderstorm’ broke out, and men working deep within the great mound felt it shudder to its base. The Dean wryly observed that the significantly timed storm was ‘much to the satisfaction… of the rustics.’
¹⁶

Similarly, in 1940 a farmer approaching the so-called Hobgoblin Stone near Lampeter in Wales with the intention of breaking it up to make gateposts was subjected to a violent thunderstorm which pursued the poor man as he ran for his home.
¹⁷

In addition to these “desecration traditions,” there are also traditions that maintained treasure was often associated with the site,
in a manner recollecting assertions of vast buried treasures of wealth and knowledge in the secret and ancient sites of South America.
¹⁸

4. Divination, Animation, Healing, and Numerical Traditions

In other traditions, megalithic sites, in addition to their astronomical orientations, were apparently used for actual divination.
¹⁹
Local customs practiced in conjunction with this oftentimes “involve the numbers three, seven or nine.”
²⁰
We have already seen how the number three emerges as a function of the topological metaphor in the previous chapter, and we have already encountered the seven sacred sages or
Rishis
of the Hindu cosmology. We shall encounter these numbers, and the number nine, again when we turn to Egypt in a subsequent chapter.

In addition to these peculiar traditions, especially those depicting
moving
stones, there are also other legends suggesting that these monuments are animated and connected with life in other fashions, including traditions ascribing healing, virility, and fertility to various stones in such monuments.
²¹

5. Gateway Traditions

Finally, as Devereux notes in the case of the traditions of the American Pueblo Indians, there are legends connecting such sacred sites to the flow of energies between this plane of reality and “other concurrent realities,”
²²
as a kind of gateway or door between worlds of one reality or another. Strangely enough, this is reflected further south in the legends of the Maya and Aztecs, and also in Mesopotamia, where the very name
Bab-El
or Babylon means literally, “door” or “gate of the gods.”

B. Devereux: The Cosmology and Physics Implications of the Traditions
of Places of Power
1. “Strange Radiation” Traditions

All of this potently suggests that we might be looking at not just a hodge-podge of entirely unrelated legends and lore about such places, but rather, at dim memories of their possible purpose and function, a purpose that was, moreover, attributable to some kind of
function
for such monuments beyond enshrining certain measures and astronomical alignments. They are strongly suggestive of an underlying
technological
purpose and meaning; they suggest we are looking at cogs in a vast machine.

This is made more evident, at least for Devereux, when one turns to consider one of the more widespread traditions associated with such sites, that of “strange radiations.”

From the pyramids to Giza to those of Mexico, and from the henges and earthworks of Britain to those of North America and continental Europe, there are abundant traditions that associate the presence of strange lights or glowing aura around such monuments.
²³
No one, for example, who has studied the lore associated with Giza in Egypt, or Teotihuacan in Mexico, can help but encounter such stories, for they are numerous and plentiful. In one sense, this is entirely to be expected in the case of the massive stone pyramids of Meso-America and Egypt, for the piezoelectric properties of quartz under stress are phenomena that are regularly scientifically studied. Quartz crystals, when shattered or subjected to stress, give off minute bursts of electricity, which show up as sparks of light. And the massive structure of the Great Pyramid, composed of enormous amounts of limestone and granite — both types of rock embedding tiny quartz crystals — is certainly in one sense a gigantic piezoelectric capacitor.
²⁴

So in one sense, such stories are to be expected, for the phenomenon is now well-known to science. Yet, this does not exhaust the anomalous nature of what sometimes is encountered at such sites. For example, Devereux uncovered evidence that Native
American Indians were familiar with concentrations of natural radioactivity and even marked such sites with distinctive petroglyphs:

American researcher, Marsha Adams, has uncovered indications that a recurring symbol found in prehistoric Native America rock art in Arizona and Nevada may indicate locations of strong natural radioactivity. Adams has measured five sites where the rock art symbol in question appears. Increased amounts of radiation were found at four sites, while there were extremely strong radiation levels at one. Maximum radiation readings were found close to the symbol of interest. In at least one case, Adams had to undergo decontamination procedures when she returned home after fieldwork at the rock at sites.
²⁵

Of course, such abnormal and anomalous radiation readings could be rationally explained by the presence of high amounts of pitchblende or other radioactive minerals in the area. But no
conventional
model would explain how the Native American Indian populations knew about them, other than, perhaps, feeling a slight heat from the rocks.

2. Shamanism, Radiation, and Grid Sites

This leads Devereux into a very interesting line of speculation, a line of speculation mingling various versions of shamanistic tradition and lore with modern science. He begins by noting that in places of abnormally high background concentrations of radiation, concentrations often associated with such ancient grid sites, many people experience some form of “heightened awareness” or “increased consciousness.”
²⁶
This, he hypothesized, is due to some sort of unknown or little understood relationship between radiation and consciousness, a relationship he calls “radiation-psi.”

This is not as wild as it at first might seem, for the Canadian neurologist Michael Persinger published a paper in the June 1995 professional journal
Perceptual and Motor Skills
entitled “On the Possibility of Accessing Every Human Brain by Electromagnetic Induction of Fundamental Algorithms.” Additionally, there is a solid argument to be made that at least some temples of the much later
classical period relied explicitly on the knowledge of radio-engineering principles, in part for long-distance communications purposes, and in part for the possible manipulation of emotional and mental states.
²⁷
In Persinger’s case, the induction of visions and memories is produced by a special helmet which beams powerfully concentrated magnetic fields into a person’s brain.

For Devereux, the implications of so many people having such experiences at so many ancient sites are clear, for they imply that
physical
energy effects “were deliberately and opportunistically employed at ritual sites,” making them “simply one part of an ancient technology of consciousness manipulation that included initiatory ordeals, ritual activity, dancing, drumming, sensory deprivation, the use of drugs — and even the nature of (the) sites themselves.”
²⁸