Chapter 52
Like a Thief in the Night (cont)

Transmitting the essence

If the circumstances were right it seems possible that the essence of the cult might survive, carried forward by a nucleus of determined men and women. I suspect, too, with the proper motivation and indoctrination techniques, plus a means of recruiting new members from among the half-savage local inhabitants, that such a cult might perpetuate itself almost indefinitely. This could happen, however, only if its members (like the Jews awaiting the Messiah) were prepared to bide their time, for thousands and thousands of years, until they felt confident that the moment had come to declare themselves.

If they did that, and if their sacred objective were indeed to preserve and transmit knowledge to some evolved future civilization, it is easy to imagine how the cult members might be described in terms similar to those used for the Egyptian wisdom god Thoth who was said to have

succeeded in understanding the mysteries of the heavens [and to have] revealed them by inscribing them in sacred books which he then hid here on earth, intending that they should be searched for by future generations but found only by the fully worthy ...

What might the mysterious 'books of Thoth' have been? Is it necessary to suppose that all the information they were purported to contain should have been transmitted in book form?

Is it not worth wondering, for example, whether Professors de Santillana and von Dechend might have earned their place among the 'fully worthy' when they decoded the advanced scientific language embedded in the great universal myths of precession? In so doing, is it not possible that they might have stumbled upon one of the metaphorical 'books' of Thoth and read the ancient science inscribed upon its pages?

Likewise, what about Posnansky's discoveries at Tiahuanaco, and Hapgood's maps? What about the new understanding that is dawning concerning the geological antiquity of the Sphinx at Giza? What about the questions raised by the gigantic blocks used in the construction of the Valley and Mortuary Temples? What about the secrets now being teased, one by one, from the astronomical alignments and dimensions and concealed chambers of the pyramids?

If these, too, are readings from the metaphorical books of Thoth, it would seem that the numbers of the 'fully worthy' are increasing, and that new and even more startling revelations may soon be at hand ...

To return briefly and for the last time to our evolving scenario:

1. at the begining of the twenty-first century of the Christian era, near the cusp of the Age of Pisces and the Age of Aquarius, civilization as we know it is destroyed;
2. among the devastated survivors a few hundred or a few thousand individuals band together to preserve and transmit the fruits of their culture's scientific knowledge into a distant and uncertain future;
3. these civilizers split into small groups and spread across the globe;
4. by and large they fail, and perish; nevertheless, in certain areas, some do succeed in making a lasting cultural impression;
5. after thousands of years - and perhaps several false starts - a branch of the original wisdom cult influences the emergence of a fully fledged civilization ...

Of course the parallel for this last category is once again to be found in Egypt. I would seriously propose as a hypothesis for further testing that a scientific wisdom cult, made up of the survivors of a great, lost, maritime civilization, could perhaps have established itself in the Nile Valley as early as the fourteenth millennium BC. The cult would have been based at Heliopolis, Giza and Abydos, and perhaps at other centres as well, and would have initiated Egypt's early agricultural revolution. Later, however, beaten down by the huge floods and other disturbances of the earth which took place in the eleventh millennium BC, the cult would have been obliged to cut its losses and withdraw until the turmoil of the Ice Age was over - never knowing whether its message would survive the subsequent dark epochs.

Under such circumstances, the hypothesis suggests that a huge and ambitious building project would have been one way cult members could preserve and transmit scientific information into the future independently of their physical survival. In other words, if the buildings were large enough, capable of enduring through immense spans of time and encoded through and through with the cult's message, there would be hope that the message would be decoded at some future date even if the cult had by then long since ceased to exist.

The hypothesis proposes that this is what the enigmatic structures on the Giza plateau are all about:

1. that the Great Sphinx is indeed, as we have argued in previous chapters, an equinoctial marker for the Age of Leo, indicating a date in our own chronology of between IO,970 BC 8810 BC;
2. that the three principal pyramids are indeed laid out in relation to the Nile Valley to mimic the precise dispositions of the three stars of Orion's Belt in relation to the course of the Milky Way in 1O,450 BC.

This is a pretty effective means of 'specifying' the epoch of the eleventh millennium BC by using the phenomenon of precession, which has been rightly described as the 'only true clock of our planet'. Confusingly, however, we also know that the Great Pyramid incorporates star shafts 'locked in' to Orion's Belt and Sirius at around 2450 BC. The hypothesis resolves the anomaly of the missing years by supposing the star shafts to be merely the later work of the same long-lived cult that originally laid out the Giza ground-plan in 10,450 BC. Naturally, the hypothesis also suggests that it was this same cult, towards the end of those 8ooo missing years, that provided the initiating spark for the sudden and 'fully formed' emergence of the literate historical civilization of dynastic Egypt.

What remains to be guessed at are the motives of the pyramid builders, who were presumably the same people as the mysterious cartographers who mapped the globe at the end of the last Ice Age in the northern hemisphere. If so, we might also ask why these highly civilized and technically accomplished architects and navigators were obsessed with charting the gradual glaciation of the enigmatic southern continent of Antarctica from the fourteenth millennium BC - when Hapgood calculates that the source map referred to by Phillipe Buache was drawn up - down to about the end of the fifth millennium BC?

Could they have been making a permanent cartographical record of the slow obliteration of their homeland?

And could their overwhelming desire to transmit a message to the future through a variety of different media - myths, maps, buildings, calendar systems, mathematical harmonies - have been connected to the cataclysms and earth changes that caused this loss?