From Atlantis to the Sphinx (13 page)

Now Bauval drove on to Saqqara, to renew his acquaintance with the pyramid texts of Unas, and found himself reflecting on passages in which the king declares that his soul is a star. Did he mean simply that his soul was immortal? Or did he mean—as J. H. Breasted had once suggested—that his soul would
literally
become a star in heaven? One of the texts says: ‘Oh king, you are this great star, the companion of Orion, who traverses the sky with Orion...’ The constellation of Orion was sacred to the Egyptians, since it was regarded as the home of the god Osiris. In the sky slightly below Orion—and to the left—stands Sirius, the star of Osiris’s consort Isis. Bauval found himself reflecting on the mystery of the Pyramid Texts, and why they appear only in five pyramids dating from the 5th and 6th Dynasties—that is, over a period of about a century. The Egyptologist Wallis-Budge, noting the sheer confusion of some of the texts, remarked that the scribes themselves probably did not understand what they were writing, and that therefore the texts were probably copies of far older documents...

The visit to Saqqara was still fresh in Bauval’s mind the next day when he visited Cairo Museum. There he noticed a large poster with an aerial photograph of the Giza pyramids. Now he was suddenly struck by the fact that the third pyramid is oddly out-of-line with the other two. The four sides of each pyramid point precisely to the four points of the compass, and it would be possible to take a gigantic ruler and draw a straight line from the north-eastern corner of the Great Pyramid to the south-western corner of the Chefren pyramid. You would expect this line to extend on to the corners of the Menkaura pyramid; in fact, it would miss it by about two hundred feet. Why this dissatisfying lack of symmetry?

Bauval was struck by another question. Why is the third pyramid so much smaller than its two companions, when the Pharaoh Menkaura was just as powerful as his two predecessors?

More than a year later, in November 1983, Bauval was in the desert of Saudi Arabia on a camping expedition. At 3 a.m., he woke up and stared overhead at the Milky Way, which looked like a river flowing across space. And to its right there was a tiara of bright stars which he recognised as Orion, which the ancient Egyptians identified with Osiris. He went to the top of a dune, and was joined by a friend who was also interested in astronomy, and who proceeded to explain to him how mariners find the rising point of Sirius above the horizon by looking at the three stars in Orion’s ‘belt’. (Orion, the Hunter, is shaped roughly like an hour-glass, and the belt goes around its ‘waist’.) ‘Actually,’ added the friend, ‘the three stars of Orion’s belt are not perfectly aligned—the smallest is slightly offset to the east.’ At this point Bauval interrupted him with a shout of: ‘
Je tiens l’affaire
’—‘I’ve got it!’ These were the words uttered by the Egyptologist Champollion when he realised that the Rosetta Stone had handed him the key to hieroglyphics.

What Bauval had ‘got’ was an answer to his question about why Menkaura’s pyramid was smaller than the other two, and offset to the east. They were intended to represent the stars of Orion’s belt. And the Milky Way was the River Nile.

What Bauval did not know at this time was that a connection between the Great Pyramid and Orion’s Belt had been the subject of a paper in an academic journal of Oriental studies as long ago as 1964. The author was an American astronomer named Virginia Trimble, and she had been asked by an Egyptologist named Alexander Badawy to help him verify his theory that the southern ‘air shaft’ in the King’s Chamber pointed straight at Orion at the time the Great Pyramid was built, round about 2550 BC. Virginia Trimble had done the necessary calculations, and was able to tell Badawy that he was correct: the air shaft
had
pointed straight at Orion’s Belt around 2550 BC. In other words, if you had been thin enough to lie in the air shaft, you would have seen Orion’s belt pass directly overhead every night. Of course, hundreds of other stars would also pass—but none of this magnitude.

If the pyramids of Giza were supposed to be the three stars of Orion’s Belt—Zeta, Epsilon and Delta—was it not possible that other pyramids might represent other stars in Orion? In fact, Bauval realised that the pyramid of Nebka at Abu Ruwash corresponded to the star at the Hunter’s left foot, and the pyramid at Zawyat al-Aryan to the star at his right shoulder. It would, of course, have been utterly conclusive if the ‘hour-glass’ shape had been completed by two other pyramids, but unfortunately these had either never been built, or had long since vanished under the sand.

But what did it all
mean
? Badawy had surmised that the southern shaft of the King’s Chamber was not an air vent, but a channel to direct the dead pharaoh’s soul to Orion, where he would become a god. In other words, the ritual ceremony to release the pharaoh’s soul from his body would take place when the shaft was targeted, like a gun barrel, on Orion, and the pharaoh’s soul would fly there like a missile.

One thing bothered Bauval. Virginia Trimble’s calculations seemed to show that the gun barrel was targeted on the
middle
star of Orion’s Belt—the one that corresponded to Chefren’s pyramid—when it should have been targeted on the southern star, Zeta Orionis, which corresponded to the Great Pyramid. This problem was finally solved by a German engineer named Rudolf Gantenbrink, who had been hired to de-humidify the Pyramid, and who had made a tiny tractor-like robot that could crawl up the shafts. His robot had revealed that the shafts were slightly steeper than Flinders Petrie had thought. Petrie had estimated the southern shaft at 44° 30', when it was actually 45°. This new measurement meant that the gun barrel
was
directly targeted on Zeta Orionis—although a century later than is generally believed. If Bauval was correct, the Pyramid was built between 2475 BC and 2400 BC.

Bauval’s curiosity now centred on the ‘air shafts’ in the Queen’s Chamber—shafts, in fact, that could not have been intended as air vents because they were closed at both ends. With the aid of a computer Bauval worked out where the southern shaft of the Queen’s Chamber had been pointing when the Pyramid was built. It confirmed his speculations: the shaft was targeted on Sirius, the star of Isis.

What was emerging was a highly convincing picture of the purpose of the Great Pyramid: not a tomb, but a ritual building—a kind of temple—whose purpose was to send the soul of the Pharaoh Cheops flying to Zeta Orionis—called by the Egyptians al-Nitak—where it would reign for ever as Osiris.

And what was the purpose of the Queen’s Chamber? From the alignment of its shaft on Sirius, Bauval believed that it was a ritual chamber for an earlier part of the ceremony: that in which the son of the dead pharaoh performed a ritual called ‘the opening of the mouth’, designed to restore life to the pharaoh. He had to open the mouth using an instrument called the sacred adze, which was made of meteoric iron. (Iron in ancient Egypt was an extremely rare metal, found only in meteorites; since it came from the skies, the Egyptians believed that the bones of the gods were made of iron.) In illustrations of this ceremony, the king is shown with an erect phallus, for a part of the ceremony concerned him copulating with the goddess Isis—hence the alignment of the shaft on Sirius, the star of Isis.

Now all this had one extremely interesting implication. According to the usual view, the three pyramids of Giza were built by three separate pharaohs as their tombs. But if they represented the stars of Orion’s Belt, then the whole lay-out must have been planned long before the Great Pyramid was started. When?

To understand how Bauval approached this problem, we must return to the precession of the equinoxes—the wobble on the earth’s axis that causes its position in relation to the stars to change—one degree over 72 years, and a complete circle every 26,000 years. Where Orion was concerned, this wobble causes the constellation to travel upwards in the sky for 13,000 years, then downwards again. But as it does this, the constellation also tilts slightly—in other words, the hour-glass turns clockwise, then back.

Bauval noted that the only time the pattern of the pyramids on the ground is a perfect reflection of the stars in Orion’s Belt—and not tilted sideways—was in 10,450 BC. This is also its lowest point in the sky. After this, it began to rise again, and will reach its highest point about AD 2550. In the year 10,450 BC, it was as if the sky was an enormous mirror, in which the course of the Nile was ‘reflected’ as the Milky Way, and the Giza pyramids as the Belt of Orion.

And it is at this point in his book
The Orion Mystery
that Bauval raises a question whose boldness—after so many chapters of precise scientific and mathematical argument—makes the hair prickle. ‘Was the Giza Necropolis and, specifically, the Great Pyramid and its shafts, a great marker of time, a sort of star-clock to mark the epochs of Osiris and, more especially, his First Time?’

This ‘First Time’ of Osiris was called by the Egyptians
Zep Tepi
, and it was the time when the gods fraternised with humans—the equivalent of the Greek myth of the Golden Age.

The date 10,450 BC has no meaning for historians, for it is ‘prehistoric’, about the time when the first farmers appeared in the Middle East. But Bauval reminds us that there
is
one date in mythology that is reasonably close. According to Plato’s
Timaeus
, when the Greek statesman Solon visited Egypt around 600 BC, Egyptian priests told him the story of the destruction of Atlantis, about nine thousand years earlier, and how it had sunk beneath the waves. The story was generally discounted because it also told how the Atlanteans had fought against the Athenians, and Athens was certainly not founded as long ago as 9600 BC. Yet—as we know—the Atlantis story has haunted the European imagination ever since.

Bauval points out that, in the
Timaeus
, Plato not only reports Solon’s account of Atlantis, but adds that Plato also says that God made ‘souls in equal number with the stars, and distributed them, each soul to a different star... and he who should live well for his due span of time should journey back to the habitation of his consort star.’ This certainly sounds a typically Egyptian conception.

Having risked offending the Egyptologists by raising the subject of Atlantis, Bauval now goes further, and mentions that the clairvoyant Edgar Cayce stated that the Great Pyramid was planned around 10,400 BC. Amusingly enough, the authority he quotes on this matter is none other than the arch-enemy of West’s Sphinx thesis, Mark Lehner. It seems that Lehner was (and possibly still is) financed by the Cayce Foundation, and began his career as a follower of Cayce; in
The Egyptian Heritage
, Lehner argued that the ‘Atlantis events’ in ancient Egypt (i.e. the arrival of the Atlanteans) probably occurred in 10,400 BC. (It should be added that Lehner has now spurned these early divagations, and reverted to orthodoxy—he is now regarded as the leading expert on the pyramids.)

Edgar Cayce (pronounced Casey) is a strange and puzzling figure. Born on a farm in Kentucky in 1877, he seems to have been a fairly normal child except for one odd ability—he could sleep with his head on a book, and wake up knowing everything in it. When he left the farm he married and embarked on life as a salesman—although it had always been his ambition to become a preacher. When he was 21, his voice suddenly disappeared, and the fact that it came back under hypnosis, but vanished again when he woke up, suggested that the problem was mental rather than physical—in fact, that Cayce was unconsciously longing to give up his job as a salesman. Placed under hypnosis again by a man named Al Layne, Cayce accurately diagnosed his own problem and prescribed its cure. Layne then decided to consult Cayce—again funder hypnosis—about his own medical problems, and Cayce explained how they should be treated. When he woke up and looked at the notes (Layne had made, he insisted that he had never heard of most of the medical terms.

After that, Cayce discovered that he had the ability to diagnose—and prescribe for—illness when he was in a hypnotic trance, and his celebrity spread.

In 1923, when he was in his mid-forties, he was shocked to learn one day that he had been preaching the doctrine of reincarnation while in his trance state. A devout and orthodox Christian, he nevertheless came to accept the idea that human beings are reborn again and again.

It was when he was describing the past life of a fourteen-year-old boy that Cayce declared that the boy had lived in Atlantis about 10,000 BC. From then until the end of his life, Cayce continued to add fragments about Atlantis. Some of these comments seemed designed to cause sceptics to erupt into fury, and to arouse doubts even in the most open-minded student of the past. According to Cayce, Atlantis occupied a place in the Atlantic Ocean from the Sargasso Sea to the Azores, and had a flourishing civilisation dating back to 200,000 BC. The Atlanteans’ civilisation was highly developed, and they possessed some kind of ‘crystal stone’ for trapping the rays of the sun; they also possessed steam power, gas and electricity. Unfortunately, their prosperity finally made them greedy and corrupt, so they were ripe for the destruction that finally came upon them. This occurred in periods, one about 15,600 BC, and the last about 10,000 BC. By then, Atlanteans had dispersed to Europe and South America. Their archives, Cayce says, will be found in three parts of the world, including Giza. He forecast that Atlantis would begin to rise again, in the area of Bimini, in 1968 and 1969. He also forecast that documents proving the existence of Atlantis would be found in a chamber below the Sphinx.

Cayce’s biographer Jess Starn has stated that his ‘batting average on predictions was incredibly high, close to one hundred per cent’, but this is hardly borne out by the facts. It is true that a few of his trance statements have proved weirdly accurate—such as that the Nile once flowed west (geological studies have showed it once flowed into Lake Chad, halfway between the present Nile and the Atlantic ocean), that a community known as the Essenes lived near the Dead Sea (verified by the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls two years after his death), and that two American presidents would die in office (as Roosevelt and Kennedy did). But critics point out the sheer vagueness of many of his prophecies, and the fact that so many of them quite simply miss the mark. Asked in 1938 if there would be a war that would involve the United States between 1942 and 1944, he missed a golden opportunity to prove his prophetic credentials by answering that this depended on whether there was a desire for peace. Asked what might cause such a war he replied: ‘Selfishness’—which, in view of Hitler’s anti-Semitism, and his desire to see the Aryan race conquering the world, seems to be oversimplification. Asked about China and Japan, he explained that ‘the principle of the Christian faith will be carried forward through the turmoils that are a part of events. . .’, which is again so wide of the mark as to count as a definite miss. Asked about Spain, then nearing the end of its murderous civil war, he declared that its troubles were only just beginning; in fact, Franco’s rule would bring many decades of peace, followed by a peaceful transition to democracy. Asked about Russia he was exceptionally vague, merely declaring that ‘turmoils’ would continue until freedom of speech and the right to religious worship was allowed. Asked about the role of Great Britain, Cayce replied with Delphic obscurity: ‘When its activities are set in such a way as to bring consideration of every phase, Britain will be able to control the world for peace...’, which must be again counted a fairly wide miss.