Chapter 52
Like a Thief in the Night (cont)

An urgent mission

The possession of a conscious, articulated history is one of the faculties that distinguishes human beings from animals. Unlike rats, say, or sheep, or cows, or pheasants, we have a past which is separate from ourselves. We therefore have the opportunity, as I have said, to learn from the experiences of our predecessors.

Is it because we are perverse, or misguided, or simply stupid that we refuse to recognize those experiences unless they have come down to us in the form of bona fide 'historical records'? And is it arrogance or ignorance which leads us to draw an arbitrary line separating 'history' from 'prehistory' at about 5000 years before the present - defining the records of 'history' as valid testimony and the records of 'prehistory' as primitive delusions?

At this stage in a continuing investigation, my instinct is that we may have put ourselves in danger by closing our ears for so long to the disturbing ancestral voices which reach us in the form of myths. This is more an intuitive than a rational feeling, but it is by no means unreasonable. My research has filled me with respect for the logical thinking, high science, deep psychological insights, and vast cosmo-graphical knowledge of the ancient geniuses who composed those myths, and who, I am now fully persuaded, descended from the same lost civilization that produced the map-makers, pyramid builders, navigators, astronomers and earth-measurers whose fingerprints we have been following across the continents and oceans of the earth.

Since I have learned to respect those long-forgotten and still only hazily identified Newtons and Shakespeares and Einsteins of the last Ice Age, I think it would be foolish to disregard what they seem to be saying. And what they seem to be saying to us is this: that cyclical, recurrent and near-total destructions of mankind are part and parcel of life on this planet, that such destructions have occurred many times before and that they will certainly occur again.

What, after all, is the remarkable calendrical system of the Mayas if it is not a medium for transmitting exactly this message? What, if not vehicles for the same sort of bad news are the traditions of the four previous 'Suns' (or sometimes of the three previous 'Worlds') passed down in the Americas since time immemorial? By the same token, what might be the function of the great myths of precession which speak not just of previous cataclysms but of cataclysms to come and which (through the metaphor of the cosmic mill) link these earthly disasters to 'disturbances in the heavens'? Last but by no means least, what burning motive impelled the pyramid builders to erect, with such care, the powerful and mysterious edifices on the Giza plateau?

Yes, they were saying, 'Kilroy was here'.

And, yes, they found an ingenious way to tell us when they were here.

Of these things I have no doubt.

I am also impressed by the enormous lengths they went to to provide us with convincing proof that theirs was a serious and scientifically advanced civilization. And I am even more impressed by the sense of urgency - of a vitally important mission - that seems to have enlightened all their works and deeds.

I go on intuition again, not on evidence.

It's my guess that their underlying objective could have been to transmit a warning to the future, and that this warning could be to do with a global cataclysm, perhaps even a recurrence of the same cataclysm that so clearly devastated mankind at the end of the last Ice Age when 'Noah saw that the earth had tilted, and that its destruction was near, and cried out in a bitter voice: "Tell me what is being done on the earth that the earth is so afflicted and shaken ... " ' These words are from the Hebrew Book of Enoch, but similar afflictions and shakings have been foretold in al1 the Central American traditions that speak of the demise of the present epoch of the world - an epoch, as the reader will recall, in which 'the elders say [that] there will be a movement of the earth and from this we shall all perish.'

The reader will also not have forgotten the date calculated by the Ancient Maya calendar for the end of the world:

The day will be 4 Ahau 3 Kankin [corresponding to 23 December AD 2012], and it will be ruled by the Sun God, the ninth Lord of the Night. The moon will be eight days old, and it will be the third lunation in a series of six ...

In the Mayan scheme of things we are already living in the last days of the earth.

In the Christian scheme of things too, the last days are understood to be upan us. According to the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Peansylvania: 'This world will perish just as surely as did the world before the Flood ... Many things were foretold to occur during the last days, and all of these are being fulfilled. This means that the end of the world is near ... '

Similarly the Christian psychic Edgar Cayce prophesied in 1934 that around the year 2000: 'There will be a shifting of the poles. There will be upheavals in the Arctic and the Antarctic that will make for the eruption of volcanos in the Torrid areas ... The upper portion of Europe will be changed in the twinkling of an eye. The earth will be broken up in the western portion of America. The greater portion of Japan must go into the sea.'

Curiously the epoch of the year 2000, which figures in these Christian prophecies, also coincides with the Last Time (or highest point) in the great upwards cycle of the belt stars of the Orion constellation, just as the epoch of the eleventh millennium BC coincided with the First Time (or lowest point) of that cycle.

And curiously, also, as we saw in Chapter Twenty-eight:

A conjunction of five planets that can be expected to have profound gravitational effects will take place on 5 May in the year 2000, when Neptune, Uranus, Venus, Mercury and Mars will align with the Earth on the other side of the sun, setting up a sort of cosmic tug-of-war ...

Could the recondite influences of gravity, when combined with our planet's precessional wobble, the torsional effects of its axial rotation, and the rapidly growing mass and weight of the Antarctic ice-cap, be enough to spark off a full-scale crustal displacement?

We may never know, one way or another - unless it happens. Meanwhile, I do not think the Egyptian scribe Manetho was being less than literal when he spoke of a harsh and deadly cosmic power at work in the universe:

Just as iron is likely to be attracted and led after the loadstone, but often turns away and is repelled in the opposite direction, so the salutary, good and rational movement of the world at one time attracts, conciliates and mollifies that harsh power; then again, when the latter has recovered itself, it overthrows the other and reduces it to helplessness ...

In short, through metaphors and allegories, I suspect the ancients may have tried to find many ways to tell us exactly when - and why - the hammer of global destruction is going to strike again. I therefore think, after 12,500 years of the pendulum, that it would only be wise for us to devote more of the resources to studying the signs and messages that have come down to us from that dark and terrifying period of amnesia which our species calls prehistory.

A speeding up of physical research at the Giza plateau would also be highly desirable - not only by Egyptologists determined to resist any threats to the scholarly status quo but by eclectic teams of investigators who could bring some of the newer sciences to bear on the challenges of this most enigmatic and impenetrable of sites. The Chlorine-36 rock-exposure dating technique mentioned in Chapter Six, for example, looks like a particularly promising means of resolving the impasse over the antiquity of the Pyramids and the Sphinx. Likewise, if the will is there, then a way can be found to get through to whatever lies beyond the little door concealed in the Great Pyramid 200 feet up the southern shaft of the Queen's Chamber. At the same time serious efforts should be made to investigate the contents of the large, square-edged and apparently man-made cavity in the bedrock, deep beneath the paws of the Sphinx, that was discovered when a seismic survey was carried out at the site in 1993.

Last but not least, far away from Giza, I suspect that our efforts might also be repaid if we were to undertake a proper investigation of the sub-glacial landscapes of Antarctica - much the most likely continent to hide the complete remains of a lost civilization. If we could establish what destroyed that civilization, then we might be in a better position to save ourselves from a similar cataclysmic fate.

In making these latter suggestions I am, of course, fully aware that there are many who will be scornful and will assert the uniformitarian view that 'all things will continue as they have done since the beginning of creation.' But I am also aware that such 'scoffers in the last days' are those who for one reason or another are deaf to the testimony of our forgotten ancestors. As we have seen, this testimony appears to be trying to tell us that a hideous calamity has indeed descended upon mankind from time to time, that on each occasion it has afflicted us suddenly, without warning and without mercy, like a thief in the night, and that it will certainly recur at some point in the future, obliging us - unless we are well prepared - to begin again like orphaned children in complete ignorance of our true heritage.