Age of Shiva (The Pantheon Series) (42 page)

Then Parashurama, bless him, took a significant step. He came forward and sat next to us. Ostensibly this was so that he could pick Aanandi’s brains, but he was obviously sending a message to the others at the same time.

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” he said. “You might know the answer to this.”

“Shoot,” said Aanandi. “Anything I can to help.”

“So we found this stone flower in the central tower at Meru...”

“The Harappa lotus, yes.”

“What the heck is it? It made our heads go all fuzzy when we got close to it. Made them hiss like a radio picking up static.”

Aanandi nodded. “You’re not the only ones. But no surprise it should affect devas more strongly than most. That lotus – it’s the true source of theogenesis. Without it, you, what you are, would not have been possible.”

“Is it something Korolev invented?”

“He wishes. No, it’s older, much older, something the Trinity brought to him and he extrapolated from. It’s the basis of his entire process. What it actually is... Well, there we enter the realms of speculation.”

“Go on.”

“Long story. How much time do you have?”

Parashurama shrugged. “Until we locate the
Makara
. I’m not doing anything else right now, so...”

He settled back in his seat and gave a short, sharp whistle, to get the other Avatars’ attention. “Guys? Listen up. I think we’re about to learn a thing or two.”

47. A NATION OF GODS

A
ANANDI SPOKE HESITANTLY
at first, then with growing confidence. I found myself picturing her speech as a sequence in a comic; a succession of tableaux overlaid with narrative captions.

She began by telling us that there are some Hindu scholars who theorise that the gods of the Vedas aren’t just embodiments of abstract philosophical concepts. They aren’t nebulous mythical entities, ideas given human form, fictitious characters playing roles in moral parables.

The Hindu gods are – were – real.

At one time, many thousands of years ago, they walked the earth.

The Indus Valley Civilisation is often dubbed the cradle of modern mankind. While the rest of the world was still mired in the Stone Age, learning how to domesticate animals and use crude tools, around the Indus river basin – situated mostly in what we now know as Pakistan but extending into India, Afghanistan and Iran – there was a flourishing, sophisticated society.

These people had advanced metallurgical skills and a profound grasp of mathematics. Their arts and crafts were of astonishing quality, particularly their elegant terracotta figurines. They had dentistry, plumbing, sanitation. Contemporary cultures in Egypt and Mesopotamia were backward by comparison.

There’s more, though. It’s reckoned that the people of the Indus Valley had access to technology of a kind we’re only just beginning to be able to replicate today, and that the proof of this lies in the Vedas.

The most prominent example is the “vimana chariot.” It’s mentioned time and again in Vedic texts – a flying vehicle capable of great speeds. In the
Ramayana
, the asura king Ravana scoots about in an “aerial and excellent chariot” that looks like “a bright cloud in the sky,” while in the
Mahabharata
another asura king, Maya, pilots a flying disc twelve cubits in diameter. The
Rigveda
depicts “golden mechanical birds” that can carry passengers up to the heavens, and then there’s the Rukma Vimana, which is a kind of conical floating fortress, and the Tripura Vimana, an airship said to be able to travel as fast as the wind.

References to vimana aircraft in the Hindu scriptures are numerous and consistent. Some are named after birds like the kingfisher and the ibis, others after larger animals such as the elephant. They’re said to draw on some form of antigravity power source called laghima and be constructed from materials that absorb light and heat. There are even suggestions that they permit interplanetary travel. The
Ramayana
describes a trip to the moon and an airship battle which took place above the lunar surface.

The Indus Valley people also had extensive knowledge of the solar system and astronomy in general, and their proficiency with medicine was remarkable even by modern-day standards. It’s thought that there was no disease – up to and including cancer – that they couldn’t cure through a holistic regime of diet, exercise and herbal remedies.

The story of the nymph Tilottama, in the
Mahabharata
, implies that they could build robots, too. Tilottama is an artificial woman studded with gemstones and created to be so beautiful that anyone who sets eyes on her falls immediately and hopelessly in love. She was used to cause a rift between the demon brothers Sunda and Upsunda so that they would stop terrorising the world. It worked: they killed each other arguing over her.

Is it so hard to believe that these humans, with their extraordinary technological and medical prowess, were considered godlike by their primitive neighbours? Is it not even possible that they weren’t human at all but a non-terrestrial race, visitors from another world, born under a distant star, who were venerated as though divine?

Hinduism famously has thirty-three crore gods.
Crore
is Indian for “ten million,” so we’re talking about 330,000,000 gods in total.

That’s not a pantheon. That’s a
nation
.

And what if this nation of space gods made its home, or at least set up an outpost, a colony, here on earth, in the northern region of the Indian subcontinent? What if the Hindu scriptures aren’t so much a religious creed as a historical record?

If so, then the epoch of these god-beings came to an abrupt, violent end. The evidence is there in the ruined ancient cities of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa. In both places archaeologists have found deep strata of green glass – the result of clay and sand being fused at high temperatures and hardening.

There’s also Rajasthan, west of Jodhpur, where scientists have identified a three-square-mile area with a greater than average incidence of cancer and birth defects. The level of background radiation is inexplicably high. Ruins nearby show signs of buildings that have been flattened. The skeletons of half a million bodies have been unearthed. Etchings on a temple wall attest to a fear of a “great light” that had the potential to devastate the region.

Northwest of Mumbai sits the Lonar Crater Lake, one kilometre across, many thousands of years old. It is not a meteorite impact site. There are no traces of meteoric material in the vicinity. Tiny spheres of fused basalt glass in the soil point to a burst of massive, intense heat and a pressure shockwave in excess of half a million atmospheres.

The
Mahabharata
speaks of a projectile “charged with the power of the universe” that exploded with “the might of a thousand suns.” Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Manhattan Project, father of the atomic bomb, firmly believed that Vyasa, the author of the epic, was referring to a thermonuclear device. Oppenheimer once told a student that he had not invented the first atomic bomb but, specifically, “the first atomic bomb in modern times.”

The Indus Valley Civilisation, in other words, destroyed itself in a spasm of nuclear fire, leaving nothing behind but rubble and a half-remembered dream of men who walked like gods, or gods who walked like men.

Which brings us to the Trinity’s stone lotus.

It was discovered about fifteen years ago by a team from the Archaeological Survey of India who were excavating in and around Harappa. The lotus turned up amidst a cache of pictographic soapstone seals in the vault of what had apparently been some kind of administrative building. It was put on display in the National Museum in New Delhi for a while, where it baffled the curators, who couldn’t decide whether it was merely a fancy ornament – a paperweight, a corbel, a candle holder – or had a greater significance and purpose. Night watchmen reported that sometimes in the silence of the empty building it seemed to give off a low, pulsing hum that made them nauseous, but the phenomenon remained anecdotal, never conclusively proven. Visitors to the museum likewise commented that the Harappa lotus was unnerving; they felt uneasy in its presence, detached, some said it was as though they were hearing voices in their heads when they looked at it.

Beautiful artefact though it was, the stone flower repelled people rather than attracted them, and eventually the museum’s board of directors voted to offload it. A number of Indian and overseas universities were keen to take it off their hands, but all of them were outbid by Vignesh Bhatnagar.

Bhatnagar, with his abiding fascination with Hindu myth, believed the Harappa lotus was an important relic of the Indus Valley Civilisation. More than that – it was connected in some way to the godlike qualities they were rumoured to possess. Might it be radiating some kind of energy, presently unknown to science, which had a disorientating effect on sensitive people? Could that account for the complaints of nausea and “hearing voices”?

He passed it on to R. J. Krieger. There was no Trinity Syndicate back then, but the two men had met several times at the Bilderberg Conference in Davos, Switzerland and had struck up a friendship.
¹
Krieger got his scientists working on the lotus, mainly as a favour to Bhatnagar but in part because there was a chance the artefact might have some property he could exploit, some undiscovered biological or chemical element he could extract and derive revenue from.

The whitecoats got busy sampling, analysing, poking around. The results were inconclusive.

It was Gennady Korolev, king of the lab, who made the breakthrough.

The lotus, he realised, exuded an energy field that responded strongly to faith.

Korolev had studied the results of all the various tests on the artefact, cross-referencing them with the human resources files on the scientists conducting the tests. The data overview showed that the lotus gave off higher electromagnetic readings whenever it was being worked on by an employee who adhered to a religious belief system.

Not all scientists are atheists. Many have found ways to reconcile empiricism with faith. Others retain the imprint of a sternly devout upbringing, although in adulthood they affect agnosticism. Religion has deep roots and can survive below the surface, if only subliminally, in even the most rational minds.

Correlating experiment with experimenter, Korolev deduced that the Harappa lotus set up a kind of sympathetic resonance with people who, consciously or not, put their trust in a higher power. To back up his hypothesis, he assembled a random selection of college-student guinea pigs and, using single photon emission computer tomography, took images of their brains as he introduced them into the lotus’s presence. Proximity to the artefact stimulated certain regions of the brain associated with religious experience. There was a increase in blood flow to the temporal lobe and a matching decrease in blood flow to the parietal lobe, considerably more marked in the test subjects who professed faith than those who didn’t. This was in accordance with the findings of experiments in the field of neurotheology which have demonstrated how prayer and meditation augment temporal lobe activity, bringing greater concentration and focus, and lessen parietal lobe activity, meaning a decline in spatial awareness. Religious trance or ecstasy, the sense of being “out of one’s body,” is neurological in origin. By contemplating the divine, you can go to a higher plane of consciousness within yourself.

What Korolev then noted, however, was that the blood flow alterations in the brain declined sharply after a minute or so. The human guinea pigs would start to complain of light-headedness, dizziness, occasionally headaches. At the same time, the lotus’s energy field would intensify.

It was as though in some way the stone flower was leeching power from the people nearby. It was absorbing their faith, sucking it up like a sponge and projecting it out again.

Korolev took his startling findings to Krieger, who shared them with Bhatnagar. Together the two plutocrats discussed what the Harappa lotus’s strange qualities might mean and how they could develop it into something marketable.

It was Krieger who proposed bio-engineering gods, superhuman beings charged and sustained by the power of faith. And it was Bhatnagar who sketched out the blueprint for the Induction Cocoon, a machine to distil worship and install it in a human body.