But another possibility is that some sort of inter-dimensional gate may open up under bodies of water under certain conditions. The strict mathematical definition of “dimension” is a direction at right angles to others. For example, a plane has only two dimensions, but anything off that plane defines a third dimension. If there are more dimensions than three it is theorized that there might be parallel universes. But “dimension” has a wider use than that and can refer to other modes of existence, such as spiritual realms, heavens, hells, and fairylands; and myth and folklore all over the world include references to such realms. Any number of researchers have noted the resemblance between ancient accounts of fairies or elves and more recent accounts of “aliens” and abductions. Some myths even claimed that time moved at a different rate in fairyland and that a man might spend a week there and return to our world to find that decades had passed. There are many modern accounts of UFOs suddenly appearing or disappearing; which might indicate some kind of gate, but, let it be noted, these gates (if that is what they are) are not confined to water. Perhaps, if there is anything to this at all, such gates are simply more common under water. Also, there is no reason to believe that the gates, if they exist at all, are continuously open; what little evidence we have seems to show them opening and then closing after only a short time.

Both ancient and modern folklore tell us of strange creatures in the water. In the vast oceans, this is to be expected; there are certain to be many undiscovered creatures there, some of them quite large, like the “megamouth” shark (a harmless plankton eater) discovered only a few years ago. But there are innumerable accounts of lake monsters in Loch Ness, Loch Morar, Lake Champlain, Flathead Lake, Lake Okanogan, Lake Iliamna, Nahuel Lake (in Patagonia), Great Lake (in Sweden), and Lake Van (in Turkey). Some of the lake monsters are described as resembling giant crocodiles or even turtles; but most, and this is true of many sea serpent reports as well, have elongated, serpent-like bodies, and they often have humps on their backs and/or bend mainly up and down…actual snakes bend mainly side to side. Often their heads are described as horse-shaped, and they sometimes have horns or antennae, and even manes. Some of these reports, like a celebrated Loch Ness photograph, may be hoaxes, and some may be mistaken identity; some researchers believe that the creatures seen in Alaska’s Lake Iliamna may be nothing more than large sturgeons. What is truly fascinating is that so many of the lake monsters resemble ancient accounts of dragons, which come from all over the world. Many dragons were associated with lakes, rivers, and even wells, and were sometimes referred to as “sea drakes” or “cold drakes.” Stranger still, some were reported as glowing brightly and traveling in the air…resembling UFOs. Certainly it is hard to understand how really large animals could survive in relatively small lakes, sustaining a large enough population to prevent inbreeding, and find enough food, and never be killed or captured or washed up on shore. This problem would disappear if we assume that they are paranormal entities and/or that they come and go from some parallel world.

Water is one of the most abundant compounds in the universe, and it is composed of oxygen, a fairly common element, and hydrogen, which is the most abundant element in the universe. Yet this common substance has some very peculiar qualities. The two hydrogen atoms in each molecule are at roughly a 105 degree angle to one another on one side of the oxygen atom, making their end slightly positive, while the oxygen end is slightly negative. This polarity makes water the universal solvent, able to break many salts and other compounds into ions, and this is perhaps the main reason water is indispensable to life, or at least the kind of life with which we are familiar. In fact, the human body is 55-78 percent water and the human brain is 77-78 percent water. Rather than describing life as carbon based, it might be more accurate to describe it as water based; if so, life, if only in the form of extremophile chemosynthetic bacteria, might be common throughout the universe, in places like Jupiter’s moon Europa or the interior of other moons, including our own. Some researchers have theorized that human beings are spirits temporarily confined to physical bodies and that the brain is mainly a kind of receiver, carrying messages back and forth between the spirit and the physical realm. If this is the case, the fact that the brain is mostly water may be highly significant.

Water reaches its maximum density at 3.98 degrees centigrade, and actually becomes less dense when it freezes at zero degrees, which is why ice floats…were it not for this, our world would be a very different kind of place. Water has low electrical conductivity unless ionic materials (like NaCl, or common salt) are added. Amorphous ice, with no crystals, can form if water is frozen very quickly…glass is also an amorphous solid. Ordinary ice, or ice one, becomes slightly more dense at lower temperatures, from .9167 grams per cubic centimeter at zero centigrade to .9340 at 180 degrees below zero. But, in addition to ice one with which we are familiar, there are at least 14 other kinds, through ice 15, which form at very low temperatures and/or very high pressure. Ice under certain conditions forms flat, hexagonal crystals (snowflakes) which have a complex, fractal geometry. Under other conditions, it forms crystals shaped like prisms with a hexagonal cross section.

Any number of independent researchers, usually with no formal scientific credentials, have claimed even stranger properties for water. In Germany in the late eighteenth century, an alternative medical theory called “homeopathy” was developed. Homeopathic practitioners believe that disease is a disturbance or imbalance in a person’s life force and that the body can heal itself. They believe that like heals like, so that a minute amount of a substance causing symptoms identical to those caused by the disease will stimulate the body’s natural healing ability. But, via a process called “potentization,” the (often poisonous) substance is diluted, usually in water, until there is not enough left to cause any harm. In fact, often there are only a few molecules left, or none at all, in a typical dose. Modern homeopathic practitioners believe that the water “remembers” the substance, that it changes the water in a subtle way, and that the water is actually storing information. It would be almost impossible to prove this conclusively, or to disprove it.

Beginning in the 1920s, researchers, mainly German, were studying cancer clusters in certain areas, places where an inordinate number of cancer cases kept appearing, and developed a theory that some kind of mysterious and harmful radiation was emerging from the earth in these areas. Dowsers, who claim to be able to locate water (and sometimes other things) with forked sticks which seem to twist violently in their hands, said that there were veins of water flowing through the ground under these locations. Cancer clusters are very real, but no one has conclusively proved that there are veins of water under such locations, let alone that there is any causal connection.

Prior to World War II, a largely self-educated Austrian forester, Viktor Schauberger (1885-1958), carefully observed flowing streams and reached some rather remarkable conclusions regarding the nature of water. He believed that water somehow “wanted” to be at its most dense temperature, 3.98 degrees centigrade, and that it “preferred” to move in centripetal spirals. Most of our heat engines (internal combustion, steam, etc.) use explosions or expansion, but Schauberger claimed to have developed an implosion technology that could release energy from this centripetal, or inward movement. As with Nikola Tesla and the claims enthusiasts have made about his discoveries, it is hard to separate fact from legend with Viktor Schauberger. We do know that he built log flumes that reduced timber transport costs and could float dense woods like fir and beech more efficiently. It is a fact that the Nazis made him a virtual prisoner during the war and put him to work on various secret projects, including cooling systems for aircraft engines. He believed in something called dia-magnetism, which, he said, opposes gravity. Based perhaps on this, there is a legend that he worked on gravity control for the Nazis, which may or may not have been connected to the “bell,” a gravity control ship they were supposedly developing. Bear in mind that even if these stories are true, it doesn’t prove that the projects succeeded. Supposedly he developed a more efficient hydroelectric power system and believed that he could build a closed “free energy” system using this vortex dynamics principle. Conventional hydroelectric systems make use of high pressure water to spin the turbines, but Schauberger believed that the velocity of the water, not the pressure, was the key to energy production. His turbine had a conical pipe, open at both ends, with ribs spiraling down the inside. Water would enter at the wide end on top, and spiral inward and down, emerging at the bottom to turn the turbine, which was a solid cone with spiral ribs on the outside, with the point at the top and the wide end at the bottom. Schauberger believed that the water, via this spiral implosion, would become cooler and release extra energy…entropy reversal and an apparent violation of the second law of thermodynamics. After the war he worked in the US for a time, and then returned to Austria, allegedly misunderstood and bitterly disappointed.

Equally controversial is the work of the Japanese researcher Masaru Emoto, who believes that water can store information and that it reacts to our music, written words, prayers, feelings, and thoughts. This is not altogether different from the Catholic belief in holy water, and it is reminiscent of the claims some amateur researchers have made about plants reacting to thoughts…and plants, like human beings, are largely composed of water. Emoto claims that his experiments showed that ordinary tap water forms imperfect ice crystals; distilled water forms simple crystals, and natural spring water forms complex, perfect, beautiful crystals. He tested the spring water from Lourdes and said that it forms slightly uneven circular crystals. Emoto believes that sincere prayers, loving thoughts, and classical music played near a sample of water caused it, when frozen, to form perfect crystals, whereas negative thoughts and rock music caused ugly, misshapen ones.

So, what does the evidence tell us? There is no doubt that water, though common, has remarkable qualities. But the evidence for gates between worlds opening up in bodies of water (or anywhere) is weak. The claims made by homeopaths, people who researched cancer clusters, Viktor Schauberger, and Masaru Emoto have yet to be duplicated in controlled experiments. Conventional scientists are unwilling to spend their time or possibly hurt their reputations by testing these claims, just as most of them are unwilling to test electrogravitics or certain “free energy” devices. And everyone has an ax to grind; if the true believers are sometimes careless in their research, mainstream scientists often act as close-minded debunkers and either refuse to look at the evidence or, if they conduct experiments, are sometimes careless or even dishonest due to their eagerness to repel any assault on the status quo. Yet the pattern of evidence for water’s paranormal qualities (and maybe even gates between worlds), though weak at any one point, is quite extensive. We should not be surprised that such a common substance should be so mysterious…our entire universe is strange and mysterious, and we ourselves may be the strangest part of it.

LOST CAVES OF GIZA Andrew Collins

Produced and Narrated by Greg Little

Ever since the age of the pharaohs, stories have circulated concerning the existence beneath the sands of Egypt of a subterranean realm— seen as the tomb of Osiris and as the underworld through which the souls of the deceased must traverse in order to reach an afterlife among the stars.

Science and history writer Andrew Collins is the author of various books that challenge the way we perceive the past, some of which are: From the Ashes of Angels, which shows that the Watchers of the book of Enoch were shamans responsible for the Neolithic revolution and that their homeland, the biblical Eden, was southeast Turkey where archaeologists have recently found the oldest stone temple in the world; Gods of Eden, which reveals that Egyptian civilization is thousands of years older than is conventionally believed; and The Cygnus Mystery, which argues that veneration of the Cygnus constellation was responsible for the world’s earliest sky religions. His latest book Beneath the Pyramids uncovers Egypt’s cave underworld for the first time, and this DVD is based on this book.

In the 1920s it was foretold by American psychic Edgar Cayce that Egypt’s lost “Hall of Records” would be found. His predictions have inspired various attempts to locate the entrance to this hall in the vicinity of the Great Sphinx. Maybe the entrance to the records has been found elsewhere!

Beneath the pyramids of Egypt lies a lost underworld of catacombs, hewn chambers, and cave tunnels, which are alluded to in ancient texts and Arab legends but have been left unexplored until today. In 2008 a set of these mysterious and long-forgotten caves were rediscovered by Andrew and Sue Collins and Nigel Skinner-Simpson with help from engineer Rodney Hale. In this intriguing documentary, extensive interviews with them are interspersed with their on-site explorations of the caves (Hale did not go on site; just interviewed). Their amazing story begins with Andrew and his wife Sue following up astronomical alignments at Giza featuring the stars of the constellation of Cygnus known as the celestial bird, the Swan; also, the Northern Cross. Aligning them to the three Pyramids highlighted the possible position to a cave entrance equated with the ancient Egyptian tradition as the Duat or underworld. This led Andrew and his team to a previously unrecognized tomb in Giza’s northern cliff, quickly dubbed the “Tomb of the Birds,” due to its apparent use as a bird necropolis in honor of a local bird deity. They found no entrance to hidden realms here, although simple survey lines projected onto the plateau by technical engineer Rodney Hale hinted that this site had a much greater significance. (Andrew Collins has a previous DVD, produced in association with the Edgar Cayce Foundation—Association for Research and Enlightenment—A.R.E., The Cygnus Mystery, based on this common belief shared by key ancient cultures, all of which were aware of the star system Cygnus’s unique place in the cosmos and its significance as the spirit path to heaven. He made a well-reasoned case for ancient awareness of cosmic rays emanating from Cygnus and for their being the spark which ignited evolution—the same spark which continues to alter our DNA right through to the present day. In his article, “Looking for the Fifth Dimension in Cygnus X-3,” he questions: Is the key to finding the relationship between multiple dimensions and matter out there in deep space? Is it a cosmic ray accelerator?)

Andrew’s colleague, the Egyptological researcher Nigel Skinner-Simpson, had separately (since 2003) been on the trail of lost “catacombs” west of the Great Pyramid, explored in 1817 by British diplomat and explorer Henry Salt. Nigel’s research took a new turn when in May 2007 he read Salt’s personal memoirs which had recently been unearthed in the British Museum. They reveal how this former British Consul General to Egypt, along with the Italian explorer Giovanni Caviglia, explored caves for “several hundred yards into the rock” before coming across a spacious chamber that linked with three others of equal size, from which various “labyrinthick” passages continued into the darkness.

Using Salt’s own notes and hand-drawn plan, Nigel painstakingly reconstructed the explorer’s excavations at Giza and finally realized that the location of the cave entrance is the Tomb of the Birds! With this new knowledge, the team returned to Giza and on March 3, 2008, finally located the concealed entrance to what every other Egyptologist and explorer had missed for nearly 200 years—the lost caves of Giza!

This discovery caused quite a furor after it was reported to Dr. Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s Minister of Antiquities, causing a media circus involving dramatic claims and counter claims. Hawass issued a stern formal statement writing that “no cave complex exists at this site.” However, he immediately ordered an excavation of the tomb complex. After having the tomb excavated, Hawass took an American film crew into the tomb to show that there was no cave complex “running under the second pyramid” but conveniently ignored his statement that the caves didn’t exist at all. On a September 2010 episode of “Chasing Mummies,” Hawass was led into the cave system and was surprised that it ran the precise length that Collins had found and reported in his book Beneath the Pyramids, which was 350 feet. However, the cave actually ran further and the final “tube” at the end of the system was explored for 30 more feet before the archaeologist who crawled into it turned back. How far this tunnel runs remains unknown.

It would be nice if credit were given where credit is due—and that certainly should be to these brave explorers—but based on Hawass’s past record, that’s not likely to happen! He’ll most likely take credit himself relating that he knew it all along, contradicting himself all the way. Collins and crew deserve respect and recognition as the instigators of this amazing discovery. At least for now, viewers can enjoy never-beforeshown film of the caves. And we’ll wait and see what comes of it.

DVD – 83 min. • $19.95 • 1-800-228-8381

LOST CITIES AND ANCIENT MYSTERIES OF THE SOUTHWEST

David Hatcher Childress

Here we are once again with David—this time in conference at the Sedona 2009 Ancient Mysteries conference where he presents a few highlights from his latest book of this same title. After giving a brief biography of his life and adventures, he goes into some detail on the Victorio (not Victoria) Peak/Doc Noss mountain of gold; Egyptians in the Grand Canyon; mummified giants and weird tunnels in Death Valley; mysterious remains of ancient dwellers alongside lakes that dried up tens of thousands of years ago; and concludes with a discussion of Tesla technology and obelisks.

Most who have been to the Grand Canyon do not know there is a lost cavern full of mysterious artifacts, closely guarded by a government which doesn’t want you to know the truth…well, maybe so, maybe not. As David questions in his book: Did an Egyptian navy cross the Pacific or Atlantic and come to Arizona? Could they have left an Egyptian tomb in the Grand Canyon, something similar to those found in the Valley of Kings near Luxor, Egypt, and similar to the one supposedly found in the Superstition Mountains? An article published on the front page of the Phoenix Gazette on April 5, 1909, claimed that just such an Egyptian rock-cut cave was found!

While many mummies have been found in Egypt, very few were in pyramids—and those that were, dated from the later historical periods. The older pyramids dating from the early dynasties (or before!) show no signs of funerary use. Mummies in Egypt are most often found in rock-cut tombs in desert canyons. The tombs often feature tunnels going deep underground with various rooms and passageways along the way. Multiple mummies are often found in one tomb, and the crypts of the wealthy and royalty were filled with precious items and everyday necessities to ease the dead person’s continued existence in the afterlife. According to the article in the Phoenix Gazette, a necropolis of mummies and artifacts similar to an Egyptian tomb was found in the Grand Canyon. An explorer named G. E. Kinkaid apparently discovered a series of catacombs complete with statues, swords, vessels, and mummies in 1908 (the exact date was not given), and he may not have been the first explorer to have seen this “cave.”

What happened to these amazing artifacts? Since the find did not become the history-altering event it should have been, why not? Well, the few facts given in the story do not check out well. The Smithsonian denies any connection with a G. E. Kinkaid. But John Wesley Powell, who famously navigated the Colorado River in the years around 1870, reported some things that are very interesting in light of Kinkaid’s story. Powell’s account corroborates the existence in the Grand Canyon of stone-carved steps that climb the walls, hollowed-out caves in the cliffs, and hieroglyphics left by some ancient race! So, did the Smithsonian actually perform the explorations described by Kinkaid and then engineer some kind of archaeological coverup reminiscent of the last scene in the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark (where the Ark of the Covenant is placed inside a crate in one of the institution’s giant warehouses never to be seen again)?

Or, one interesting suggestion is that, while the discovery was real, the archaeologists might not have been. Kinkaid may not have been working for the Smithsonian out of Washington D.C., at all, but merely claiming to be doing so. This may have been a coverup for an illegal archaeological dig that was raiding the ancient site and claiming legitimacy from a very distant, venerated institution. It may have been difficult, in 1909, to check on the credentials of the archaeologists.

While the DVD quality isn’t great (the sound is a bit “tinny” at times), it doesn’t need to be if you’re a Childress fan; as he gives his usual enthusiastic presentation with his infectious, wide-eyed, child-like imagination. He doesn’t provide in-depth research or proof, but gives enough “What if’s” or “Maybe’s” to entice one into his adventure. Then, if you want more confirmation, you can do your own research.

DVD – 87 min. • $19.95 • 1-800-228-8381

METAMORPHOSIS: The Beauty and Design of Butterflies

Illustra Media

Illustra Media produces video documentaries that examine the scientific case for intelligent design. Working with Discovery Institute and an international team of scientists and scholars (including Michael Behe, Guillermo Gonzalez, Stephen Meyer, and Lee Strobel), Illustra has helped define both the scientific case for design and the limitations of materialistic processes like Darwinian evolution. These documentaries (some of which have been reviewed by Atlantis Rising) include: Unlocking the Mystery of Life, Privileged Planet, Darwin’s Dilemma, DNA by Design, and now Metamorphosis: The Beauty and Design of Butterflies.

Throughout history butterflies have fascinated artists and philosophers, scientists and schoolchildren with their profound mystery and beauty. In Metamorphosis you will explore their remarkable world as few ever have before.

Spectacular photography, computer animation, and magnetic resonance imaging open once-hidden doors to every stage of a butterfly’s life cycle—from an egg the size of a pinhead to a magnificent flying insect. It is a transformation so incredible biologists have called it “butterfly magic.”

The superbly engineered body of a butterfly is magnified hundreds of times to reveal compound eyes made of thousands of individual lenses, wings covered with microscopic solar panels that warm the insect’s muscles for flight, and navigational systems that unerringly guide Monarch butterflies on their annual migration from Canada to Mexico.

How did these extraordinary creatures come into being? Are they the products of a blind, undirected process? Or, were they designed by an intelligence that transcends the material world? It seems impossible to use evolutionary terms to describe these amazing creatures, which were obviously designed by an intelligence beyond our imagination.

Biologists have long recognized, according to the DVD, that natural selection cannot succeed by taking large, evolutionary leaps. Instead, the process can only move forward through a series of small, incremental steps. In evolution, it’s the smaller-scale changes that have a better chance of being passed on, because they’re relatively limited in their scope—that means they’re disrupting less and they’re more likely to be tolerated by the organism.

But, when it comes to the origin of metamorphosis, the notion of gradual evolutionary change comes to a dead-end. By its very nature, metamorphosis is an all-or-nothing proposition; and throughout biological history, its success is hinged upon the immediate availability of a full set of instructions, including genes, proteins, and the developmental program required to integrate them. It all has to be in place ahead of time— needs to have the genes in place; the regulatory elements that are going to turn the genes on and off; it has to have all the cells preprogrammed to do what they’re going to do when the time comes so they respond to the signals they’ll get in the right way. The larval cells have to know they’re going to die. You’ve got to remember, the caterpillar isn’t thinking about things, like: OK, now it’s time to dissolve my epidermis, and what about that gut; gotta get workin’ on that gut; no—it has to happen rapidly and in a coordinated fashion.

Once you’re committed to the chrysalis stage, there’s no going back. You have to complete the transition. A caterpillar that’s equipped to go 10 percent or 25 percent of the way through metamorphosis is in no way through metamorphosis. Partway into a process that requires getting out the other side as a fully formed adult doesn’t work. You have to re-create adult legs, adult antennae, adult eyes; you have to change the shape of the brain and the connections between the antennae and the eyes. You have to reformat the gut so that it switches from eating plant material to eating nectar. How many mutations does it take, and how do you coordinate all of that? If you get the eyes right, but the gut wrong, it’s a failure as a butterfly. If you get the wings right and the legs right, but the muscles don’t attach, that butterfly is going nowhere; it’s dead. You begin to see the depths of the problem; so, for evolution to have created this sort of pathway gradually, it would have taken a miracle.

Metamorphosis, if it came into existence at all by an undirected process, had to have done so in one fell swoop. Natural selection, by definition, the film argues, cannot build that kind of process. To create a process like metamorphosis, you’d need a totally different type of cause— something that could see a distant target, keep that target in focus, and provide all the resources necessary to hit the bullseye on the first shot. The only cause, the film suggests, that could accomplish that is an intelligent agent.

Filmed in the rain forests of Ecuador, Mexico’s Trans-Volcanic mountain range, and leading research centers, Metamorphosis is an unforgettable documentary filled with the joys of discovery and wonder. As all Illustra films, this is excellent production quality—and more—the scholarship, the reasoning, the classiness of the whole presentation will blow you away!

DVD – 83 min.• $19.95 • 1-800-228-8381

Tresham was released from prison in 1593. He had been held because he was a Catholic and was considered a threat to the ruling Protestant order. It is said that his prison cell contained drawings and material that would ultimately find their way into the design of the Triangular Lodge. As the story goes, while in prison at Ely in 1590, he was reading a treatise on proofs of the existence of God. Suddenly three loud knocks startled him and inspired upon him the overwhelming theme for his lodge-to-be: the number three.

The political history of the Tresham family is interesting. In 1559, Thomas became one of the largest estate owners in the country. The family were supporters of Mary Tudor (later Mary I); and while Henry VIII suppressed the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, when it was reinstated in 1557-1558, Thomas Tresham the elder—the grandfather of the lodge builder—became Grand Prior. Thomas “the builder” was knighted by Elizabeth I at Kenilworth Castle in 1575. About 1566, he had married into another Catholic family, to Meriel, the daughter of Sir Robert Throckmorton, of Coughton Court in Warwickshire. Together, they would create one of the most impressive libraries in Elizabethan England.

However, in 1570, Pope Pius V launched a bull declaring Elizabeth deposed and released her Catholic subjects from their allegiance. When Spain launched the Armada against England in 1588, English Catholics were expected to assist, but few felt “called upon.” Penal laws against Catholics were passed in 1581, 1585, and 1593. As a consequence, Thomas was continuously in prison, subject to house arrest, or under surveillance between August 1581 and April 1593. He would find himself in prison again for a few months in 1594 and again in the winter of 1597 1598.

Work on the lodge stared on July 28, 1594 and it was completed by 1597. It is not the only enigmatic building Tresham created. He also built New Bield at Lyveden, which he started in 1594 and which was left unfinished at the time of his death in 1605. Here, he commemorated the Crucifixion rather than the Holy Trinity, with a cross-shaped plan and a frieze of carvings of the Instruments of the Passion.

But what is remarkable about the lodge is that it is all about the number three. Seeing that Tresham was a Catholic, Triangular Lodge is seen as a symbolic hymn to the Trinity. However, a few have noted that the Trinity is not exclusively Catholic, and hence, the question arises: was Tresham’s devotion to the number three “merely” Catholic, or something more?

At a basic mathematical and visual level, the entire structure represents three. Each of the three exterior walls is 33.3 feet long, each has three triangular windows and is surmounted by three gargoyles. The inside has three floors. Decoration-wise, there are three Latin texts, each 33 letters long, which run around the building. They read: Aperiatur terra & germinet salvatorem (Let the earth open and… bring forth salvation, Isaiah 45:8); Quis seperabit nos a charitate Christi (Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?, Romans 8:35); Consideravi opera tua domine et expavi (I have contemplated thy works, O Lord, and was afraid, a paraphrase of Habakkuk 3:2).

Though three is the common denominator, there is great variation within the details. The windows all have different designs. The largest is a trefoil, the family emblem; the basement windows are small trefoils with triangular lights. Around the windows on the first floor are plaques for the family emblems, some of them left empty, no doubt to be filled in by future generations—that never accomplished their assigned task.

Above the entrance door is the Tresham coat of arms and the Latin inscription: “Tres testimonium dant,” meaning “The number three bears witness” or “Tresham bears witness.” Such a pun was precisely what most such “Elizabethan follies” attempted to incorporate: several layers of meaning.

So far, so good, but above the door is also the number 5555. Some experts have speculated that this originally might have been 3333, which would indeed fit nicely with the three-theme, but where to go from there? Hence, others argue that 5555 could be the year 1593, for according to the Reverend Bede, it was in 3958 BC that the biblical flood occurred. Others, however, see 55 as a reference to “Jesus Maria” (each containing 5 letters), though others see it as “Salus Mundi,” “Saviour of the World”. The beauty of such follies is that one might not necessarily have to choose which one is correct; all solutions could be correct. The important question however is: Is it all quite benign or is there far more to this, and might the monument contain a secret code, a layer that so far no one has cracked? Is this building a rebus? (According to Wikipedia, a rebus is an allusional device that uses pictures to represent words or parts of words. It was a favorite form of heraldic expression used in the Middle Ages to denote surnames.)

Continuing our exploration of the building, the principal room on each floor is hexagonal, thus leaving the three corner spaces triangular; one of these spaces contains a spiral staircase—the remaining two are small rooms. The building is crowned by three steep gables each surmounted by a three-sided obelisk at the apex. But as soon as the devotion to the number three is once again apparent, the emblems on the gables begin to pose deep and interesting questions. There is a seven-branched candelabrum; another depicts the seven eyes of God; a Pelican picking her own chest; a hen and chickens; a dove and serpent; and the hand of God touching a globe. Finally, the triangular chimney is adorned with the holy monogram “IHS,” a lamb and cross, and a chalice. Confused? Or, indeed, nothing more than a folly and not to be taken seriously?

Carved in the gables are the numbers 3509 and 3898, which some have argued should be taken as dates: that of Creation and the calling of Abraham. But there are also other dates, like 1580, which is thought to have been the date of Tresham’s conversion to the Catholic faith—by Edmund Campion, a missionary priest, though no one can be sure of the date.

Others have continued the numerical path, arguing that all of them are divisible by three; and that, when one subtracts 1593 from them, they end up giving 33 and 48 as dates, which is the alleged date of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary. Numerical coincidence, or evidence that there is, indeed, a clever rebus encoded into this building? Again the question whether it is merely a puzzle or whether there is an even deeper layer, one that might lead to some important message which Tresham could only encode within the fabric of a building. The Lodge is indeed an Elizabethan device, and Tresham himself said that the harder a device was to interpret, the more commendable it was “so long as it be perspicuously to the purpose”. The question is therefore: what is the purpose?

Alan Moore has featured the lodge in his novel Voice of the Fire, which tackles Tresham’s son Francis, who was one of the Gunpowder Plot conspirators. Moore takes the story into magic, but historians believe that the Lodge was indeed a sacred building. Treshem leased a deer park at Brigstock, which contained a small lodge, where it is believed Mass was said. Historians believe that the Triangular Lodge was equally used as a “chapel” and an inscription in the upper room, SSSDDS, “Sanctus Sanctus Sanctus Dominus Deus Sabaoth,” hints that this was indeed “hallowed ground.”

That the Triangular Lodge is a celebration of the number three is obvious. Furthermore, Tresam means “I am three.” And seeing that the Treshams were Catholic, the conclusion many jump to is that it is all about the Trinity. But is it? Again, the Trinity is not specifically Catholic. Furthermore, the family’s involvement with the Gunpowder Plot is highly intriguing for we know that several of the plotters had a rather “magical mission” in mind, which is why the entire episode is so captivating to the likes of the magically minded Alan Moore.

The Treshams were one of England’s most important families and they had fought for the Catholic cause. It is known that the Catholic cause had several “magical” dimensions at that moment in time, including the presence of Giordano Bruno on English soil. Bruno spent two years living with Sir Philip Sydney, a man instrumental not only in the creation of the Shakespearean literature but who also operated on many other levels.

Specifically, Bruno was a student of the Corpus Hermeticum, the secret tradition, which had been popularized during the Renaissance and which, in the sixteenth century, remained more popular than ever. Bruno had studied from the best: the writings of Ficino, who had helped the de Medici family of Florence shape the Renaissance with artists like Donatello and Botticelli. And within this wider context, we need to ask whether the reference to “three” is not to a magical person who was specifically identified with the number three: Hermes Trismegistus, Hermes Thrice Great, the “father” of the Corpus Hermeticum, a religious book that has as many levels as an Elizabethan device.

Though there are numerous references to three, there are also numerous references to three times three, which is underlined by the fact that there are a total of nine angels holding water spouts under the gables for draining water off the roof, each inscribed with two letters, or with one letter and a triangle. These give: SSSDDS and QEEQEEQVE, or “Sanctus Sanctus Sanctus Dominus Deus Sabaoth, Qui Era et Qui Est et Qui Venturus Est”, or “Holy Holy Holy Lord of God of Hosts, Who was, and who is, and who will be.” It could be a reference to the Trinity, but if we read this on the magical layer, then nine is an important number, as are the nine principles that surround the creator father—a Hermetic con­cept, if only because the Florentine Academy founded by the de Medici contained nine—and only nine—members. Coincidence, or design? Though historians are quite open to the possibility that Mass was said in the lodge… could it have been a slightly different type of Mass than the traditional?

Thomas was succeeded by his son Francis, who died imprisoned as a traitor in the Tower of London for involvement in the Gunpowder Plot. The main instigator of the plot was his first cousin, Robert Catesby, though it is Guy Fawkes who is popularly associated with the failed blowing up of Parliament.

On October 26, 1605, Tresham’s brother in law, Lord Monteagle, received an anonymous letter warning him not to attend meetings at the Houses of Parliament. The letter almost certainly came from Francis Tresham. Monteagle communicated his concerns to the government, which uncovered the plot in time. Though Francis died in prison of natural causes, his corpse was decapitated, and his head was set up over the town gate of Northampton. Opinion now has it that he had known of the plot but was not directly involved.

And with that, the Treshams have gone down into history as good Catholics; the Lodge itself has gone down as an Elizabethan folly. But perhaps the decoration of some of the more bizarre numbers on the walls might lead us into an even more esoteric dimension, one given to the Lodge by the likes of Alan Moore but, so far, not converted into hard historical facts—that what the Treshams were up to could have been far deeper than a puzzle to occupy one’s mind. A man who had worked on this building in prison, did he do so merely to entertain his mind? Or did he instead use it as a means to encode certain knowledge, which he would set out to realize, as soon as he was set free?

Oddly enough, fewer people have actually made a successful landing on Rockall than have reached the summit of Mount Everest. That has not stopped the growing list of emigrants signing on to become citizens of the planet’s newest country. Measuring 80 feet by 100 feet, the only near-level surface is 70 feet above the water and is not an easy climb. Pounded by North Atlantic winds and protected by deadly underwater rocks, it seems unlikely to be colonized anytime soon.

If the weather and the climb to a flat surface were not difficult enough, Rockall is surrounded by Helen’s Reef which regularly claims the ships of those who sail nearby or attempt to land. Why would anyone want what has been called “the most isolated rock in the oceans of the world?”

Rockall has two things going for it. The first is a mysterious history. While the origin of the name is uncertain, it is most likely Gaelic from Sgeir Rocail, the Roaring Sea Rock or Ripping Sea Rock. Situated northwest of Ireland and directly west from Scotland’s Hebrides, Gaelic speaking sailors may have encountered the rock from ancient times. Between Greenland, Iceland, and the British Isles, many islands existed in the past that simply sunk in the cold ocean. A large group of islands called the Gunnbiorn Skerries included one island 60 miles long that was above sea level 500 years ago but gone before the eighteenth century. Rockall may have been part of a group of islands that were once also not submerged. The numerous discussions over just who owns Rockall has never been resolved, although Parliament would agree that England does. They reached that conclusion even though one Member of Parliament, William Ross, pointed out that more people have landed on the moon than the tiny island. One thing they also agreed on in “The Island of Rockall Act of 1972” was in declaring the other rocks around Helen’s Reef to be non-islands.

The first recorded crossing of the North Atlantic was that of an Irish priest, St. Brendan born in AD 489. His travels include landing on several islands that cannot be found today. It is hard for some not to dismiss his voyage as fantasy as Brendan and his intrepid Argonauts claimed at one point to have landed on a large whale.

Authentic or not, Papars, the name given to Irish hermits and monks who purposely left European culture were found to have made settlements in Iceland, Greenland, and possibly even Maritime Canada (if the Norse Sagas are correct.)

Celtic legend referred to islands in the Atlantic including Hy Brasil, the Isles of the Blessed and the Fortunate Isles. (An Irish word breas means fortunate.) These islands in the dangerous waters of the hostile North Atlantic had given birth to Fomorian Sea-Giants, powerful sea monsters who could change shape and possessed a liking for human flesh. Were they whales, or squid, or simply fantastic entities created to protect the rich cod banks from discovery by other fishermen? Whatever the answer, the existence of Brasil under various spellings was accepted as real.

In 1480, the English fishing port of Bristol began an annual search for the island of Brasil, or at least it claimed to be. Wealthy merchant John Jay outfitted an 80-ton ship to reach Brazil and others followed. Hy-Brazil, like Rockall, was often placed on the map of the Atlantic just 300 miles west of Ireland. It was known as both fact and legend for a long time, and most likely it was real, although there is no certainty that Rockall and Brasil are the same. There is also no certainty that the Bristol sailors were really searching for the legendary isle, as they left with tons of salt. Some believe they were bypassing the Hanseatic League’s ban on cod fishing. Brasil was noted on modern maps since the 1325 chart of the Genoese Dalorto. It would appear on the famous 1375 Catalan Atlas and the 1513 Waldseemuller’s map. It was on Toscanelli’s chart of 1457 that Columbus used on his first journey. It would continue to appear on maps until very recently. While many scoff at Brazil as simply being a Celtic legend, it is tough to land on such a legend.

Two Dutch mapmakers, P. Plancius and C. Claesz, included the island in their 1594 atlas of the Northern Atlantic Ocean referring to it as Rookal.

In 1674 Captain John Nisbet of Donegal came upon the legendary isle after a fog lifted. He sent a small landing party that claimed to find a castle and cultivated land. Cattle, sheep, and horses were maintained, but it took a while to find anyone living there. Finally a Scottish gentleman came forward. He appeared to be living there with servants; and if there were women and children, they did not show themselves. Their clothing and language were from an older time, and the island was obviously out of touch with modern affairs. He presented the Captain with a gift of silver and gold, possibly in hopes he would leave.

The next year Nisbet’s story was confirmed by Alexander Johnson who sailed there to verify the tale. He reported that the island did exist and he was treated hospitably. While it could be Rockall, neither makes note of having to climb to the surface area, and it is unlikely cattle would have been easily landed on such a place. Had another island existed that would soon be submerged?

In 1686 a Basque ship, most likely fishing for cod, ran aground on the reef. Most of the fishermen survived by limping east on their small ship to tiny St. Kilda.

Even the most Atlantis-phobic among scientists will admit that islands have come and gone in the actively volcanic North Atlantic. Some of the islands can lie just below the surface, and their rocks and reefs can present a grave danger to sea captains, just as serious discussion of Atlantis can present to the careers of historians.

A literary reference to Rockall appears in the 1703 Description of the Western Isles of Scotland where it is called Rokal. There were said to be inhabitants who called the place Rokabarra. Oddly enough a Scots—Gaelic folk belief states when “Rocabarra” rises again, the world will be destroyed.

Is it possible that the island has risen and fallen before? What is known is that it is part of an eroded core of an extinct volcano. It is not the only one. A large seamount exists between Rockall and Scotland’s Outer Hebrides. On November 14, 1963, a huge explosion complete with plumes of ash and steam saw the volcanic island of Surtsey being born in the North Atlantic near Iceland. Rising and falling seabeds and mountains, while rare, do take place.

In 1810 the first reliably recorded landing had the HMS Endymion land to measure the small island. A follow-up visit by the survey ship Leonides made that ship a victim to the surrounding reef. In 1824 the Helen of Dundee was heading for Quebec when it collided with reefs near the rock, and most of the passengers were left to drown. Sixteen passengers died while 12 crew members sailed away. The reef earned the name “Helen’s Reef” after the damage.

In 1846 a Clan MacKay member may have landed and annexed the small island for his family. This claim was announced by J. Abrach MacKay, a minor Highland official, in the 1950’s although the veracity of the claim is unknown. Another British ship attempted a landing in 1862 when the HMS Porcupine landed one person recorded as a “Mr. Johns,” who was unable to make the summit. The Brasil-Rockall area is known as the Porcupine Banks.

Remarkably, a sighting of Brazil was documented as late as 1872 shortly after the British Admiralty charts had finally taken Brasil off the chart. They had referred to it as the “Brasil Rock.” An author, T.J. Westropp, claimed to have sailed to Brasil three times, and on his last voyage, he brought several others including his mother to confirm the island. They reported the island appeared and disappeared. Rockall’s height would seem to keep it from being confused with the near-sea-level height of Brasil.

While the British Admiralty charts may have dumped Brasil/Rockall, the island would not just go away. A fishing boat skipper may have been the first to climb to the top in the 1880’s. Thirty years later the dangerous reef of Rockall would claim more casualties. In 1904, the SS Norge was packed with immigrants heading to a better life in America. It was a bad luck ship from the day it launched. It collided with a dredger ship; it hit and sunk a Newfoundland fishing boat; and later it was lost in a fog. The Captain, Valdemar John Gundel, was captain during the first two incidents and coincidentally both occurred on the 28th of the month. Later on June 28, 1904, the Norge found itself in another fog. It had been completely surprised by the island itself and the treacherous reef that protected it. The captain unsuccessfully attempted to back off the reef. The ship filled with water so quickly it’s stern was underwater in 10 minutes. The entire ship would sink in 20 minutes. Seven hundred and twenty seven passengers and 68 crew members were left to struggle in the cold waters. Less than 200 survived. Some reached the Shetland Islands in the lifeboats.

Between the two World Wars the British decided the island had strategic value. A number of aborted landings were attempted without success. After the war, on Sept 18, 1955, the British survey ship, the H.M.S Vidal did finally succeed in landing. They hoisted the Union Jack, fired a 21 gun salute, and left behind a plaque claiming the island. This will go down in history as the last expansion of the British Empire.

They also measured the features of what they called the Rockall Plateau. They assigned names from Tolkein’s Ring Cycle books. Eriador, Gonor, and Rohan were names assigned to the seamounts as is the Gandalf Spur.

When they returned four years later, the plaque was gone; and Ireland, Iceland and Denmark all laid claim. Geologists decided because it is part of a shelf called the Porcupine Bank, it belongs to Denmark’s island of Greenland. This did not stop England from issuing oil drilling and fishing rights.

This is the other—possibly more important—thing tiny Rockall possesses. It is located close to deep-sea oil drilling and sits on top of a giant coldwater coral bed. The likelihood of drilling is slim, as on occasion storms from the west bring waves of gigantic size that smash against the tiny island. None of the four countries wish to give up their claims, however.

To further England’s claim to the tiny island, a former SAS member and survival expert, Tom MacLean, actually lived on the island between May and July of 1985. His career, which started with a childhood in a tough orphanage, spent nine years with the Parachute Regiment of the SAS in which he was shot and left in the Borneo jungle; and hemade a solo sailing trip across the Atlantic ocean. His mission was to insure Britain’s claim to Rockall. Upon landing, he broke his ankle but still made the climb to the summit. His only neighbors during that lonely 40-day stretch were the black-legged kittiwakes and the common guillemots that use the tall rock as a resting place on their own North Atlantic ventures.

If the competition between four countries was not enough, another contender entered the picture. At 9:40 p.m., June 10, 1997, a handful of Greenpeace activists landed and claimed Rockall as their own. The reason was to save the tiny island and the surrounding area from oil drilling. Six days later, from a ledge halfway to the summit which they magnanimously declared to be the capital, they declared Rockall to be the world’s newest nation under the name Waveland. Greenpeace claimed that they did not own it; Rockall as Waveland was it’s own country. They immediately declared the presence of this new nation on the Internet and invited all to become citizens. Within months 15,000 new citizens from across the planet received certificates of citizenship and could apply for passports. While an unsurmountable island that could not support 15 members, no less 15,000, making survival seem difficult at best, the media company that managed their website and held the citizenship data base collapsed taking along all of the records of its citizenry. Like Atlantis, Waveland seemed doomed to be little more than a memory, and a short one at that. Rockall itself did survive and remains one of the planet’s most isolated islands.

How would you respond if your child began telling you a story about who he had been ‘before’ and included a list of very specific details, including names and places, about his previous life. For example, Kemal, a child in Turkey, told his parents details of his previous life since he was around two. He claimed he had lived in Istanbul, 500 miles away. He said his family name had been Karakas, that he’d been a wealthy Armenian Christian who lived in a large, three-story house. He also named his neighbor and stated that his house had been on the water where boats were tied up and was next to a church. Kemal gave many more details about his life.

How would you respond if you heard such a story? Parents in more materialistic societies believe their children’s stories are playful daydreams, vivid imaginary tales, or news stories the children are repeating from television. Some parents, who come from cultures where belief in reincarnation is more common, listen to their children’s tales and take them at their word. Sometimes they even have enough information to seek out the family in the location where their child says he has lived before.

Simply put, reincarnation is the belief that souls can be reborn in different bodies at different times and places. Many different faiths embrace reincarnation, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, as well as the beliefs of numerous indigenous groups. People who believe in reincarnation see it as normal part of the progression and development of the spirit, whereby an individual soul evolves through different lives. Many faiths say this same process occurs with animals and other forms of life.

Historically, writings about reincarnation show up around the fifth or sixth century BC in East Indian, Hindu, and Buddhist traditions as well as in Greece. Pythagorus believed that the soul of humans was spiritual and eternal, only temporarily residing in the body, and surviving physical death. Plato also supported this idea and suggested that if a person lived a good life, he would progress to a more spiritual state. The Hindu belief in karma proposes a much more elaborate correlation between how our activities in one life affect how we are reincarnated in the next, proposing a progress from lower to higher and more realized forms of embodiment.

There is also evidence that reincarnation may have been believed in much earlier in human history. There are reports that the early Druidic practices embraced the idea. Some of the early records in Egypt show the path of the soul leaving the body and becoming embodied again. Also, since there is widespread belief in reincarnation among indigenous cultures, it is reasonable to suggest that as soon as early, primitive cultures adapted more elaborate rituals at death, the existence and movement of the soul was part of human thought.

The majority of modern Christian and Muslim practitioners reject reincarnation. Though early Christian believers did embrace reincarnation, in AD 553 it was officially stigmatized as heresy and effectively removed from church doctrine. Modern theologians though have suggested that reincarnation would not conflict with the teachings of the church, and some Islamist sects accept the idea. Now with the prevalence of scientific materialism which does not allow for consciousness being separate from the body, there is less belief in the phenomenon worldwide. Modern surveys suggest that only 25 to 35 percent of people believe in the possibility of the soul’s rebirth in another body.

Yet, even today, the idea of rebirth is very strong in some cultures. In Tibetan Buddhism, for example, it is believed that the souls of great Lamas will be reborn. When a great Lama dies, a search begins for the new incarnation of that soul. Close friends and other Lamas will watch for visions and intuitions of the individual’s re-embodiment. As time passes, others in the community will watch for certain characteristics to be displayed by young children. As potential prospects grow older, they will have to pass certain tests to convince other Lamas that they are in fact the reincarnated individual, such as identifying personal affects, displaying similar personality traits, to even having similar body markings. This is a volatile issue in China and Tibet and is seen as a way China is trying to subvert the independence of Tibet. If China claims a Lama is reborn in China, they can then control the child and his education and, consequently, control the Tibetans more effectively.

The Indian holy man Satya Sai Baba, who only recently died, stated that he was the reincarnation of the Indian holy man, Sai Baba of Shirdi. He also said for his third incarnation he would be reborn in Gunaparthi, in the Mandya district of Karnataka, in India. Not only holy people have made these kinds of predictions. There are numerous reports, in cultures where these beliefs are more prevalent, of individuals stating that they were going to come back and what kind of life they were going to live.

Is it possible to prove a soul can reincarnate? Those who believe consciousness is a phenomenon of the material physical brain claim such a proposal is simply impossible. Those who are open to considering the idea, yet still rely on the tangible facts, are right in claiming that it is very hard to prove reincarnation.

One of the most common encounters a Western person has with reincarnation is with hypnosis. In New Age circles, trauma from a past life can be blamed as a cause for physical illness or for a wide range of emotional and psychological difficulties within the person’s current life. Using hypnosis, individuals claim to have vivid rememberings of past lives. Yet, these hypnotic memories have clearly been shown to be subject to a wide variety of errors and wishful thinking. The ‘memories’ can easily be influenced by the hypnotist or the subjects desires. Many skeptics disregard all hypnotically generated material as suspect, even though some spontaneous experiences in hypnosis may be genuine past-life recall.

There is a body of research about reincarnation that is becoming more and more accepted. As with the story of Kemal at the beginning of this article, there are now thousands of documented reports of children sharing details of their previous lives. The most convincing reports are those where the researchers recorded the children’s stories and then were able to track down the location, friends, and family of the deceased individual. In these cases, there is often an amazingly accurate corroboration of the facts.

In Kemal’s story, his parents didn’t know anyone in Istanbul, yet they listened to his story. When researchers heard all the information the child had shared with his parents, they had enough details to be able to track down the family, the friends, and the house where the child said he had lived. All of the information Kemal provided proved accurate.

This is one story that is described in Jim Tucker’s book, Life Before Life. Tucker has been conducting research with Dr. Ian Stevenson, who is perhaps the most well known researcher of these childhood experiences. Since 1958, Stevenson has compiled over 2500 cases that are recorded in the Division of Personality Studies at the University of Virginia. Though many of these cases come from countries where the belief in reincarnation is stronger, such as Turkey, Myanmar, India, Lebanon, and Sri Lanka, there are also cases from the United States and other Western countries. Tucker has outlined the rigorous, scientific approach researchers use to gather and collect their data. To be registered, each case has to meet at least two of the following criteria:

Prediction of rebirth, with identifying details.

An announcing dream.

Birthmarks or birth defects related to the previous life.

Statements about the previous life.

Recognitions by the subject.

Unusual behavior by the subject relating to the previous life.

Dr. Stevenson has focused his research on cases with birthmarks and birth defects, since these physical properties provide tangible evidence that supports the claims of the children. These birthmarks are often correlated with amazing accuracy to wounds or traumas received when the person died, such as the entrance and exit wounds of a fatal bullet. These physical signs may also include birth defects that relate to the previous individual’s serious illness or traumas that occurred earlier in his life. The children often describe with accuracy how they were killed and who killed them. In some cases, these crimes have been reported and verified.

One interesting twist to the physical signs is that of intentional marking. In some Asian countries, people practice what Stevenson calls “Experimental” marking. Usually a family member or a close friend will place a mark on a dying person’s body with some kind of soot or paste while invoking a prayer and a suggestion that the dying person take that mark with them to their next life. Stevenson documents cases where this seems to have occurred; a child will be born with the same mark on her body. Later on the child will demonstrate some of the other criteria.

When most of the criteria are present in a case, it makes for an impressive confirmation of the theory of reincarnation. How one responds seems to depend largely on preexisting beliefs. Skeptics still argue that there are flaws and that it couldn’t be so; believers argue that that the evidence is overwhelming and may want to discover their own past lives.

Skeptics argue that a person in a culture that believes in reincarnation can convince himself that his child had another life. Parents might exaggerate the child’s story and change it to fit the details of a deceased person. This seems harder to explain when cases are ‘solved’, meaning the previous life is found, after the child’s statements have been recorded. This explanation seems less likely when a child describes a life that occurred at some distance, even in a different country. It is also harder to explain a child’s story and behavior when they go against the wishes of the family, as when a child displays culturally taboo behavior such as behaving like the opposite gender or requesting cigarettes or alcohol at a very young age.

Dr. Stevenson claims that the cultural beliefs of the dying person determine the possibility of reincarnation and how it occurs. In some countries for example, it’s believed that you can only reincarnate as the same sex. Thus, those are predominantly the cases that are reported. In the United States very few cases are reported, although there is great interest in the phenomenon with adults in New Age circles. Stevenson suggests, in the case of the non-believing country, it’s not just that parents of reincarnating souls wouldn’t take them seriously, it’s also that the children themselves may not believe it is possible and wouldn’t speak of it or wouldn’t remember their other lives.

There are also a range of different cultural conceptions of the soul and how souls can reincarnate. Among the Gitxsan tribe of Northern British Columbia, an individual may be able to come back several times and even embody several different bodies simultaneously. In Tibet, there is a similar belief that one Lama can come back as multiple people. Other North American tribes believe that part of the soul stays with the body and part always stays in the other world even when reincarnated. There is even the possibility that the path of the soul may not follow the linear flow of time. A person may be reborn at a time before they died. The notion of one soul, one body, and a linear flow of time may be a limited, Western view which is based in Newtonian-Cartesian science.

One interesting variable in these cases is that there is a typical window of time when children usually remember. They start sharing as soon as they are verbal, as early as the age of two. Then, typically, somewhere around ages six or seven, they begin forgetting, so that when they are older they may have no memory of the previous life or even of talking about it. Memories can come at other ages though, if there is a particular experience that triggers a memory.

Often, when a young child tells of a traumatic death, she may be very emotionally upset and agitated, perhaps even having disturbing dreams. Yet, when they tell the story to their parents, and the parents are receptive, the emotions subside over time. Through sharing, the child is able to desensitize and even forget the trauma and get on with her life.

A similar process is used with past-life occurrences in hypnotherapy. For example, when helping a client release a fear of water, a therapist might induce a trance and ask the client to remember the first time he remembers experiencing the fear. This may be done with only a suggestion that the experience may have happened earlier in life. Then the individual might spontaneously describe an experience of drowning and being a different person. As the client experiences the feelings along with the imagery and memories, he is able to release the fear or trauma he is holding. Frequently, it doesn’t matter to the individual if it can be proven to be a past life. Yet, framing in that context, which he may do himself without any prompting, allows him to understand his experience and get on with his life without his previous fear.

Skeptics wonder, if reincarnation is real, why we don’t all remember previous lives. One explanation may be psychological. As growing children develop egos, they forget the parts that don’t relate to their personality. Everybody does this in some way, shutting out parts of themselves that are in conflict with their image of themselves or what’s acceptable. It may be that most people, even if they are coming in from another life, focus on their being in this life. Even the children who do remember tend to forget as they develop a more individual personality.

Yet, when these kinds of experiences occur, they may reinforce a cultural belief in a larger multi-life development of a soul that is valuable. These values influence how people behave. If you believe in a cycle of karma influencing reincarnation, you will act differently in this life. If you believe all beings, including animals, are evolving through a larger life cycle, it will change how you view their importance in this world.

One other interesting aspect to reincarnation is that some children’s stories, as well as cases from hypnotic regression, tell of the intermediary places beings go between lives. Brian Weiss talks about this in his book, Many Lives, Many Masters. Children have also described places of transition, with guides, lessons to be learned, and a perspective that comes of a larger reality beyond this physical life. Stories from different Native American tribes tell of another world and choosing to make a journey to this world for another life. These choices often relate to a particular purpose the soul wants to undertake. Perhaps it is a gift to all of us when a child expresses a relaxed attitude towards death and a trust that there is something more after death. Perhaps when we sense a young child is an ‘old soul’ we can truly listen to what she has to say and remember the parts of ourselves that are larger than the dream of this physical world.

Patrick Marsolek is the director of Inner Workings Resources. He is also a clinical hypnotherapist and the author of A Joyful Intuition. See www.InnerWorkingsResources.com for more information.

Runes

The Runes, (“Gods of the Runes,” by Frank Joseph, A.R. #89), like all occult paradigms, are propaganda. Their purpose is to divert/pervert the Truth. But since propaganda is deception, the propagators are themselves deluded. Yet to truly lie, one must know the actual truth. Thus mythologies, though misleading, were created by double agents such that wisdom was veiled so it could survive in a “civilized” world order, being clear to those with “ears to hear.”

So the runes have three layers: propaganda, hidden agenda, and converse Truth.

Runes present the propaganda of a patriarchal ruling elite, so-called gods, who are said to be generative and empowered. Runes indicate the hidden agenda of these controllers, yet it is still “glorified” as a righteous path. Here, too, the goddesses show up as second-class deities to window-dress the dark objective.

The third layer, Truth, is unspoken. Firstly, it is feminine, the converse of god-like dominion, such that its virtues are opposite to elitism and exploitation, being egalitarian and benign. Secondly, it is the converse of so-called civilization, being a paradigm of inspiration, reason, and peace. The origin of runes is the warrior’s tattoo brand and his notched tally-stick of kills. Conversely, Truth is a spiritual quest for transcendence, not domination.

BJ Street – Paso Robles CA

Angelic Identities

In “The Angel Effect” (A.R. #88) Patrick Marsolek starts off by identifying angels as “intermediaries between humans and God,” who is the “creator and overseer of the universe,” but goes well beyond the meaning of “angel” as “a messenger of God.” He neglects to mention that they are pure spirits who, specifically, as “guardian angels” maintain intimate liaison between the human soul and its creator, while the more generally important messages are delivered by “archangels.” [Marsolek] doesn’t seem to realize that St. Thomas is organizing the list of different functions which are performed by other kinds of pure spirits in his identifications.

Instead Mr. Marsolek introduces all kinds of legendary beings from polytheistic religions and relates them to God, as though they are angels. This is just fiction. None of them—tricksters, puck, demons, fairies, “demoted anges,” “former humans, devas, djinn, etc.—are truly “angels.” He even makes the ludicrous statement, “Satan…a fallen or dark angel [is]…an agent of God” in the Christian faith. Satan may have been a principal of power when in heaven, but now his only relationship to God is as adversary. “Devas” can be seen as workers for this “deva-el.” Dr. Robert Schoch has the scientific honesty to clarify in his article “Secrets of the Jinn,” that “angels differ from jinn,” since they are definitely “the messengers and servants of God.” Angels project a human image. I understand that your magazine is dedicated to irregular speculations, but you should reject submissions that are degrading to the religions of many of your readers.

Paul Tremblay – Barrie, ON, Can.

Ancient Civilization and The Bible

Most linguistic scholars seem to find that the common alphabet of today had its origins some 4000 years ago. That there was a common language and writing before this time period is quite evident. However, it is likely that it was at the time of the establishment of many different languages, at the time of the Tower of Babel, that our present alphabetical system began to be developed. This was almost certainly the case with Hebrew. For, it is from that language that we have the present day, oldest continuous history book—the Bible. It would seem that, through the patriarchs Noah and Shem, the ancient writings of the pre-flood world were translated into Hebrew. Noah—having lived until the time that Abraham was at least in his late teens, and Shem having lived until the patriarch Jacob was between 30 and 60 years old. There is a tradition that Noah, who had settled in the area close to where Babylon was founded, dug down through the flood sediment and brought out many of the ancient books that were in the libraries of the pre-flood era. He easily could have given the Hebrew translations of those writings to his sons and grandsons.

Gen. 1:1 states, “In the beginning, [Elohim] created the heaven and the earth!” The earth that is spoken of has absolutely no time limit given as to its original creation nor as to how many times it had been destroyed, and recreated. What follows in chapter one is simply the final recreation, which took place in order to make the earth habitable for the future creation of, and use of, mankind. Prior to this last re-creation, the earth had been “prepared” in many ways. And there easily could have been millions or billions of years in which other re-creations took place; for instance, a time period when the earth was prepared with all of its metal, gems and the like. another time period with no limits, when the earth was prepared with its coal, oil, and other needs that would benefit man in the future. There is no reason not to believe that during some of those periods, there were “man like creatures” as well—perhaps sort of an experimental system for what would be the greatest “man” creation. “Elohim” in Hebrew gives us many answers as to the hows and wherefores of those civilizations that preceded our own. For, in Hebrew, the word Elohim is plural. To put a simple-to-understand definition to its meaning, all one would have to know is that it can mean “the spiritual realm.” Strong’s Concordance shows this to be true, though religionists will deny it almost entirely and very vehemently. They are simply unable to give up the errors of their ancient religionist forefathers.

According to the Hebrew interpretations, it was the angels of the spiritual realm that did the actual work of creating the earth and its later universe. Again, there is no time limit given for the length in years of each “evening and morning.” The sun and moon, which define evening and morning in our calendar system, were not even created until the fourth day. Second Peter 3:8 tells us that “One day is with the Lord as a thousand years.” Since there is absolutely no proof that the days were 24 hours each, the religionists should be very careful in their protestations.

Keeping in mind that there is no proof that each “day” was 24 hours and that they could have been 1000 years or even more, then let’s see how it is, and when it was, that “advanced civilizations” could have preceded the creation of Adam and Eve, some 6000 years ago.

Gen. 1:26, “And Elohim, [the angelic, spiritual realm] said, Let us create man in our image, after our likeness.” Though people will not want to believe this to be true, it is nonetheless well supported by scripture. For example. Cain, as a punishment for killing his twin brother Abel, was kicked out of the borders of Eden. Adam and Eve, and any other of their children born after Cain and Abel, would have remained within the borders of Eden. Yet, Cain had this to say to the Lord. “I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth. And it shall come to pass that every one that finds me shall slay me.” If all of the descendants of Adam and Eve were still within the territory of Eden (though no longer in the garden), and there is no evidence they were not, then the only ones Cain was afraid of killing him would have had to have been those “human beings” that the angels had previously created—perhaps those who had been created a long time before Adam and who would have had many centuries to have settled and developed the earth. If they had their angelic creators aiding them in their work projects, they could have constructed many great projects, which today we view as beyond human endeavors.

What happened to all of the water that covered the earth prior to the “dry ground appearing?” Well, there was far too much to fit into the area of clouds that we have today, so it is quite likely that most of that “fresh only” water was removed out into the heavens and later became the “mist on Venus and the ice on the outer planets.” Hey, it’s worth the thought.

Ray E. Daly – Lincoln, ND

Basque Mysteries

This issue (#88) had two articles most interesting to myself: “Atlantis in Spain” and “Sumerians in Tiahuanaco.” To follow up on author Frank Joseph; he made a statement in one of his books which I wish he would expound on in an article—that the Mayan Calendar we see was a carving of an actual working machine, such as the Antikythera computer. In conjunction with cities shaped like Atlantis, would maybe the Basque have been these people? They at one time controlled this whole area. I have watched and researched them since I was in grade school.

Re David Childress: I have some of his books, too, but he must have a library 20 times bigger than mine. I have looked for some of the books he has referenced; but he does find some unusual things. South America and the Aymara Indians are most interesting; I follow them like the Basque.

Dianna Bourke Privette – Jacksonville Fl

Gravity Control

Jeane Manning has documented the resistance of the scientific establishment to “free energy” technologies and the difficulty in securing patents. The same is true for gravity control devices (which purport to generate a gravitational field) and for reactionless space drives, which attempt to generate a thrust in one direction without expelling a reaction mass in the opposite direction.

I have an idea for such a device, and I have described it to three physicists (including the well-known ufologist Stanton Friedman). All three listened to my explanation, understood me perfectly, and, while agreeing that such a device apparently violates the well-established law of conservation of momentum, were unable to find a specific flaw in my reasoning. In other words, the forces should balance, but none of them could show me where they balanced. Imagine two flat-coil electromagnets, arranged like two plates stacked one above the other a centimeter apart. The top one is turned on for one thirty billionth of a second and then turned off, at which time its electromagnetic field, traveling at light speed, has reached the bottom one, which is then switched on for only one thirty billionth of a second. The bottom one, encountering the field from the top one, is pulled up (assuming unlike poles facing one another; but when its field reaches the top, one the top one is not pulled down, because it has been turned off. In other words, in every cycle there is a force in one direction but not the other. Supplied with energy from a solar array or beamed microwaves, the device could propel a spacecraft.

Even if there is something I (and three physicists) overlooked, a simple thought experiment based on this principle (an electromagnetic field no longer “connected” to the electromagnet which generated it), is airtight and poses a challenge to conventional physics. Replace the bottom magnet with a simple piece of un-magnetized iron at some considerable distance from the top one, which is switched on briefly. The iron will be pulled toward the electromagnet, and, even if the force is too weak to measure, it will still be unbalanced. Apparently there is a loophole in the law of conservation of momentum.

Ben Stoecker – Sacramento, CA

Write to us at Letters to the Editor, Atlantis Rising, P.O. Box 441, Livingston, MT 59047 or jdkenyon@atlantisrising.com

What are the implications behind the relative silence from the SCA regarding this exploration?

Will the Southern Shaft of the Queen’s Chamber and Gantenbrink’s “door” ever rise to prominence again?

Did the discoveries behind Gantenbrink’s “door” support or contradict the many theories about what would be found there?

Going back as far as the seventeeenth century, there are accounts of numerous explorations into the Great Pyramid that have yielded significant new details of the structure. Before 1872, the Queen’s Chamber shafts were no mystery because as far as visitors to the chamber were concerned, they did not exist. All that changed, however, when British explorer, Waynman Dixon, detected a crack in the wall and was able to push a rod deep into the crack without meeting any resistance, prompting him to have the limestone chiseled away revealing a square opening measuring 20.32 cm (8 in) wide and 22.35 cm (8.8 in) high. A similar shaft was subsequently found in the north wall.

Because of the machine-like, technical appearance of the Great Pyramid and the precision with which it was built, I began, in 1977, developing a theory that the original function of the Great Pyramid was intended not to be a tomb but a power plant. Within the context of the power plant with all its attributes and anomalous features which other theories were unable to explain without resorting to symbolism, I found a practical answer. The Queen’s Chamber, I proposed, served as a reaction chamber; and the shafts leading to this chamber supplied two chemicals (I proposed a combination of dilute hydrochloric acid and hydrated zinc) that, when mixed together, created hydrogen.

In 1993, a German robotics engineer, Rudolph Gantenbrink, on contract to install ventilation fans in the King’s Chamber shafts, after cleaning the debris using a robot, proposed that he use his robot, named “Upuaut II” (meaning “opener of the ways”) to coax from the depths of the pyramid more of its secrets by exploring the Southern Shaft in the Queen’s Chamber. While the exits from the shafts from the King’s Chamber are found on the outside of the pyramid, no exit has ever been found for either of the Queen’s Chamber shafts. I was viewing the exploration by Gantenbrink; and when the robot came to the end of the shaft, what is now famously known as Gantenbrink’s “door” came into view with two metal pins attached. (The shaft due to its small size could only allow a small animal to pass—Gantenbrink does not call the block a “door,” as have various Egyptologists—but rather a USO, or Unidentified Stone Object, a nomenclature that I will adopt for purposes of this article.) A friend immediately claimed that they looked like electrodes, which made sense to me; for in order to maintain the head pressure, the shafts had to be kept full, and electrodes could serve as a switch to signal replenishment. In 1998, my book, The Giza Power Plant, incorporated this theory.

Then in 2002, to much fanfare and excitement, “Opening of the Lost Tomb”, which offered to show live a new exploration of the Queen’s Chamber Southern Shaft, was broadcast in Europe by National Geographic and in the U.S. by Fox Television. The documentary captured 30 million viewers in the U.S. alone, glued to their television sets to watch a new robot named “pyramid rover” drill through the limestone block which held the metal fittings and then insert a camera through the hole to see what lay beyond. Prior to this broadcast, I posted two articles on my website explaining the reasoning behind my analysis of these shafts and what would be revealed if we were able to look behind it. Based on what I wrote in The Giza Power Plant, the last article outlined a prediction of what would be found behind the “USO.” The prediction included a drawing of the continuation of the metal fittings, or wiring attached to them, and a chemical supply shaft for the delivery of the chemical. The information gathered by the robot was not conclusive, but parts of the theory were supported—particularly the USO’s thickness.

Following the 2002 exploration, an occasional report would appear that promised a new exploration in the near future. Then on May 25, 2011, an article appeared in New Scientist online magazine describing the latest exploration of a new robot, named Djedi, which provided new images taken behind the USO. These images show that my design concept, while being a workable solution, was not quite correct. But far from being dismayed, I was impressed that the ancient Egyptians’ design was much better and delighted to note that greater evidence had been revealed than I had hoped!

I was astonished that information regarding this long awaited exploration had been released without fanfare. Zahi Hawass, the minister of antiquities in Egypt, and director of this recent expedition, described these internal features as the “last great mystery of the Great Pyramid.” With the last exploration broadcast on Fox television in the U.S. garnering 30 million viewers, why was National Geographic or Fox television not involved?

Reading the article and looking at the grainy images of the back of the stone block with the metal fittings, it became clear that the author and expedition team members were aware of the power plant theory. Rowan Hooper writes, “Metal is not part of any other known structure in the pyramid, and the discovery ignited speculation that the pins were door handles, keys or even parts of a power supply constructed by aliens.” As the first person to publish a work that described the pins as electrical devices, I must set the record straight that I have never credited the construction of the Great Pyramid to aliens, or any other people, except the indigenous people living in that area at the time. Moreover, the discovery of the pins in 1993 was not the trigger that gave birth to the idea that the Great Pyramid was a power plant; they simply enhanced the proposed use that I had formulated in 1977 for the Queen’s Chamber and the shafts. Shaun Whitehead, the camera designer from the company Scoutek in Melton Mowbray, UK, said, “Our new pictures from behind the pins show that they end in small, beautifully made loops, indicating that they were more likely ornamental rather than electrical connections.”

Kate Spence, an Egyptologist at Cambridge University, UK, indicated that the USO would have served a symbolic purpose, a door with door handles. This notion has been proposed before. German Egyptologist, Rainer Stadelmann, speculated in the 2002 documentary that the pins were symbolic door handles for the King to use to symbolically raise the door so that his soul can fly off to the stars to which the pyramid shafts are allegedly aligned.

The continuation of the pins on the backside of Gantenbrink’s USO was not the only discovery captured by the new robot. The images also revealed some mysterious symbols drawn on the floor in red paint. Peter Der Manuelian, an Egyptologist at Harvard University and director of the Giza Archives at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, said “Red-painted numbers and graffiti are very common around Giza. They are often mason’s or work-gang’s marks, denoting numbers, dates, or even the names of the gangs.

There was no immediate explanation for what these red symbols mean, but they are a significant discovery and have the potential to open up an entirely new area of research in gaining an understanding of ancient Egyptian symbolism. When considered along with the metal pins the symbols provide key evidence necessary to support the theory of an electrical use of the pins and also give us a roadmap for exploration into the future. Not only did the ancient Egyptians leave us with the physical evidence that proves this to be so, they also provided us with an electrical schematic that showed how the pins were wired!

The first most important discovery is the design of the two pins. Judging by their relationship to the size of the space, the pins are approximately .8 cm (5/16 inch) in diameter. Figure 1 shows the metal loop, with what appears to be a gap where the loop on the right pin seems to be inserted into another hole in the limestone block. The left pin shows signs of corrosion, similar to those in the main shaft, though not as severe. There also seems to be a white deposit around the left pin and its hole, while the right pin has what appears to be a black ring encircling the hole that penetrates through to the main shaft.

As these images did not match those that I had predicted, the expedition team evidently believed that the controversy had been settled and that that they served as more mundane objects and not electrical devices. This conclusion certainly would be more acceptable to those who hold the keys to the pyramid and control what information is given to the public. Also overlooked in the report was the somewhat faint evidence of a cable curling out of the top of the USO near the center and traveling along the ceiling. (See Figure 2)

The image of the floor behind the USO is especially intriguing (see Figure 3 & Figure 4). The patchwork of stitched together images reveals a wealth of information. The helical wraps of more flexible conduit can be seen lying on the floor near the bottom of the image just left of the red painted line—probably left there by the maintenance crew. The metallic appearance of this object and the helical turns of the metal have the same appearance as a length of flexible conduit that has been pulled apart while being disassembled would have. There are indications of more lengths of this material on the floor that are not as distinct as this one. Also just above and to the right of the red line is what appears to be an opening in the floor with anomalous objects nearby and one of them seeming to disappear into the opening.

While it appears that the maintenance crew did not clean up after performing repairs in the space behind the USO, the debris was not the only evidence they left there. They also left instructions on how to wire the pins! These instructions were painted as symbols onto the floor and represent a simple wiring diagram. The uppermost symbol – depicted as a number 5 with the lower loop almost closed, represents the left connector through which the pin is pushed until the end of the loop meets the limestone. The pin was probably tapered at the end which allowed it to enter the loop and gradually push it open while the connector loop held onto the pin as it tried to achieve its original shape. The vertical leg of this connector is not to scale (as very few wiring diagrams are), but the actual connector probably had a longer vertical leg up to the point when it is bent at right angles towards the center of the USO where the cable is located.

The center symbol that shows a round circle with a forked line below it could represent the cable through which electricity flowed. It is positioned between the upper and lower connector symbols on the floor as the flexible conduit is positioned between the right and left pins in the USO. The lower connector symbol is roughly similar to the upper with the exception of the top bend, which could go right or left as when installed it wouldn’t matter which way the loop was turned. All the symbols, including the line (which would logically represent the main cable coming from the USO) were more than likely positioned on the side that would identify the positive electrode.

All that has been revealed by the Djedi robot describes an electrical device which was accessible to workers for maintenance. Considering the erosion on the pins in the main shaft (the negative electrode having broken off in antiquity) and considering the extreme tapering that was more than likely caused by the rise and fall of a corrosive liquid, another significant conclusion that can be made is that these electrodes must have been replaced periodically. At the same time, the electrical cables were probably replaced and some of the shielding was left in the space. The entire design supports this view! The pins were made so that they could be removed easily and another one put in its place. Also, seating the lower loop into a blind hole would prevent the electrode from turning in the hole. After it was seated in position, the pin protruding into the main shaft would be bent 90 degrees and fixed securely in operating position.

Gantenbrink’s Upuaut II also revealed another important feature of the electrodes. After they were positioned in the hole, a sealant was applied and this can be seen clearly in Figure 8.

The implications of robot Djedi’s mission are stunning. They clearly indicate that there is access to the end of the Queen’s Chamber shafts and a passageway exists within the pyramid. This lends support for part of Pierre Houdin’s internal ramp theory and suggests that one must exist for access to the Queen’s Chamber shafts. Perhaps other parts of the structure, also!

Besides prompting further exploration in the Great Pyramid, to find ancient symbols and to be able to clearly connect them with a knowledge and use of electricity in prehistory is extremely exciting. It opens up a whole new area of study using knowledge and tools that have been previously excluded from ancient Egyptian studies. The question now is who will replace Hawass in broadcasting remarkable discoveries to the press? Will his successor take up the media mantle and be as effective in bringing attention to Egyptian antiquities? Say what you want about Hawass, the Egyptian antiquities scene has gone relatively quiet since he was replaced.

www.gizapower.com

In the past it has been argued that the thousands of complex designs showing up regularly in fields are the work of hoaxers. For a while two English pubsters, known as Doug and Dave, took a lot of the credit. Tales of clandestine midnight rope-and-board dragging fitted well into the hokum narrative promoted by the press and science establishment, so, many observers were more than willing to give the pair credit and then to forget the matter. When, however, the circle appearances continued throughout the world, usually over night and on a scale and complexity far beyond the capabilities of any ordinary hoaxers, the Doug-and-Dave hypothesis began to fade. Generally the response of the mainstream to the phenomenon has been to ignore it entirely unless it could be made into some kind of spooky yarn, good for ratings. After all, what could it possibly be but a trick?

For professor Taylor, crop circles are nothing to dismiss. No matter who makes them, the creators are clearly very good at what they do. In fact, he says, if nothing else, the patterns are actually the work of great artists who are, at the least, masters of modern terrestrial—if not extraterrestrial—technology. He thinks they use the Global Positioning system, lasers, and microwaves, as well as highly advanced mathematics and invisible construction grids.

As for who or what might go to the trouble of making so many of the things, Taylor remains at a loss. The unknown circle creators, he says, “are not going to give up their secrets easily.” Whoever they are, he believes, they are artists, and the crop circle phenomenon is, “the most science-oriented art movement in history.”

All of which leaves the rest of us to settle for one of the following explanations:

Either we have a secret army of mischievous, albeit creative, humans scattered around the world who not only have ready access to all the latest expensive technology but the skills to use it in the dark of night, on a scale of acres, for years, undetected—all while thousands of researchers and skeptics swarm their handiwork, vainly seeking to flush out the publicity-shy creators. Indeed, in some cases, researchers have camped on sites where patterns, unseen the night before, have, as if by magic, appeared fully formed in the morning.

The other possibility: someone or something originating in some unknown dimension on Earth, or perhaps, in outer space, is trying, it would seem, to get our attention.

Take your pick. Either one is sensational.

The two scientists succeeded in having “entities”—a more acceptable word to scientists than “spirits”—dip their hands and feet, and even part of the face of one, into some paraffin so that molds could be made of their body parts. The “Paraffin Hands Case” has gone down in the annals of psychical research as one of the most, if not the most, convincing case offering objective evidence of spirit life.

Richet was certainly not a pseudoscientist, as debunkers like to claim when some researcher finds evidence for the paranormal. Winner of the 1913 Nobel Prize in medicine for his research on anaphylaxis, the sensitivity of the body to alien protein, Richet was a physiologist, chemist, bacteriologist, pathologist, psychologist, aviation pioneer, poet, novelist, editor, author, and psychical researcher. He held doctorates in both medicine and science, serving as professor of physiology at the medical school of the University of Paris for 38 years.

Nor could Geley be called a pseudoscientist. A Laureate of the French Academy of Medicine, he had gained some fame for his research in anesthesia and for new methods of treating smallpox, erysipelas, and scarlatina when, in 1918, he accepted the directorship of the Institute, of which Richet was president. The primary objective of the Institute was to investigate paranormal phenomena, especially mediumship, under strict scientific controls and conditions.

Kluski was a 50-year-old writer and poet who had discovered his mediumistic ability just 18 months earlier. In Paris, there were 14 separate experiments with Kluski, all but one in Geley’s laboratory. Other scientists, including Camille Flammarion, a world-renowned astronomer, sat in on one or more of the experiments.

The general protocol called for the medium to be thoroughly searched before being admitted to the laboratory and for the doors of the laboratory to be locked from the inside at all times. With some mediums, Geley went so far as to require gynecological and rectal examinations to rule out hidden objects. Because the ectoplasm produced by mediums and later reabsorbed by them is sensitive to white light, red lights were used, permitting some visibility, although it was inadequate for photography; and there was concern that flash photography would negatively affect the ectoplasm and thereby injure the medium.

It was Richet, who some years earlier, gave the name “ectoplasm” to the mysterious protoplasmic substance that streams from an orifice of the medium—from the mouth, ears, nose, pores, and even from the vagina of some mediums. It had earlier been referred to by scientists as teleplasm, psychoplasm, psychic force, and odic force. When Sir William Crookes, an esteemed British chemist, first reported on it in connection with the mediumship of Florence Cook during the early 1870s, Richet was among the many scientists who scoffed and thought that perhaps Crookes, the discoverer of the element thallium and a pioneer in x-ray technology, had “lost it.” But after his own investigation of mediums began during the 1880s, Richet changed his position. “I avow with shame that I was among the willfully blind,” he wrote in dedicating his 1923 book, Thirty Years of Psychical Research, to Crookes, commending him for his courage and insight.

Richet, Geley, and other researchers came to realize that ectoplasm takes on different forms. Sometimes it is thick and milky looking and at other times vaporous and invisible. Kluski’s was of the latter type. “This ectoplasmic formation at the expense of the physiological organism of the medium is now beyond all dispute,” Richet proclaimed. “It is prodigiously strange, prodigiously unusual, and it would seem so unlikely as to be incredible; but we must give in to the facts.”

While there were a few mediums in the world strong enough or developed enough to produce ectoplasm which would result in full body materializations, Kluski apparently was not one of them. Faces, arms, and hands were usually observed with him. According to Geley, the experiments would begin with a strong odor of ozone. “Then, in weak light, slightly phosphorescent vapor floats around the medium, especially above his head, like light smoke, and in it there are gleams like foci of condensation,” he explained. “These lights were usually many, tenuous, and ephemeral, but sometimes they were larger and more lasting, and then gave the impression of being luminous parts of organs otherwise invisible, especially finger ends or parts of faces. When materialization was complete, fully formed hands and faces could be seen.”

At one sitting, Geley observed a hand at the end of an arm form under his eyes, cross the circle in front of Kluski and touch Mme. Geley, who was facing him. “It was a masculine hand, very well formed,” Geley wrote. “The wrist was slender, the forearm and upper arm were enveloped in white tissue with regular longitudinal folds. Immediately after the contact felt by Mme. Geley the hand disappeared.”

Geley further noted that the lights represent the first stages of materialization. They would sometimes disappear at once and sometimes proceed to characteristic human forms. As Geley, Richet, and other researchers came to understand it, the fact that many of the materialized forms were incomplete or fragmentary, sometimes just two-dimensional, occasionally grotesque in appearance, did not suggest fraud, as many skeptics assumed. Rather, they were simply indications that the medium was not developed enough for the entities to produce complete forms. In fact, the incomplete manifestations seemed to run contrary to any fraud explanation, as it was deemed highly unlikely that a charlatan would have expected anyone to believe that such strange manifestations were real in the first place.

The researchers also came to understand that the entity must project an image of himself or herself into the ectoplasm for a form to materialize. With another medium, Richet noted that the deceased husband of one of the sitters was present but said he could not show himself because he had forgotten what he looked like when alive. He later showed himself without a face.

Another researcher reported that the communicating entity said that he had to visit his old home to view a portrait of himself on the mantel before he could show himself, as he also could not recall what he looked like. When still another researcher asked why only a face was seen, the entity said that he had visualized only his face. Indications were that people who lived before photography was invented had a more difficult time showing themselves, as they never had a good image of themselves even when alive in the flesh. In effect, the ability of entities to use the ectoplasm and produce a good likeness seemed to vary as much as artistic ability varies with humans.

Geley and Richet had heard of similar experiments involving paraffin molds taking place in the United States and England, but those experiments were said to be inconclusive due to questionable controls; so they decided to replicate the earlier experiments under more controlled conditions to see for themselves. “The procedure is to set a bowl containing paraffin wax, kept at a melting point by being floated on warm water, near the medium,” Geley explained. “The materialized ‘entity’ is asked to plunge a hand, foot, or even part of a face into the paraffin several times. A closely fitting envelope is thus formed which sets at once in air or by being dipped into another bowl of cold water. This envelope or ‘glove’ is then freed by demateriazation of the member. Plaster can be poured at leisure into the glove, thus giving a perfect cast of the hand.”

There was no question in Geley’s mind that there was some kind of unseen intelligence cooperating with them in their experiments. Communication coming from the entities was carried out by loud raps, e.g., one rap for no, three for yes, and so many for each letter of the alphabet. At one sitting, the entities asked those in the room to sing, apparently because more harmony was needed, and as they sang, Geley and the others heard hand clapping, as if coming from several entities.

However, Geley noted that the “invisible collaborators” did not seem to possess a high order of intelligence. “They seem to me to have the mentality and capacity of artisans, no more,” he wrote. He further observed that they cooperated by doing as requested. When Geley asked for a foot mold, it was given. Moreover, the entities seemed to be as interested in the results of the paraffin molds as the scientists on this side were. Geley observed “one of these beings take hold of a luminous screen, throw its light on the gloves, and look at them long and curiously, with keen curiosity.” But the dim red light limited the researchers’ observations of the particular phenomenon. They could hear a splashing when the hands were dipped and for the most part could observe only a trail of white and slightly luminous vapor, the form of which was constantly changing. Hot paraffin was sometimes spilled on the scientists and on Kluski.

When debunkers are unable to discredit scientists, they suggest that even the best scientist can be duped by a skillful magician. To completely rule out any sleight of hand by Kluski—although Geley, Richet, and the other researchers were certain he was not a trickster—Richet held one of Kluski’s hands while Geley held the other during the experiment. In their experiment of November 15, the hand of a child was produced in the paraffin. In a later experiment, on December 27, Geley and Richet added some bluish coloring matter to the paraffin. “This was done secretly, to be an absolute proof that the molds were made on the spot and not brought ready-made into the laboratory by Franek or any other person and passed off on us by legerdemain,” Geley explained. Two very good hand molds were obtained, one a left and one a right hand, both the size of children five to seven years old.” He further noted that both had a blue tinge to them.

In all, they obtained nine molds, of which seven were of hands, one of a foot, and one of a mouth and chin. But the entities did not identify themselves or give any indication who they might have been when alive. Geley observed that there was a negative correlation between communication and materialization. That is, when they tried to communicate, there was no power to carry out the materialization, or when they materialized there was no power for communication.

“In completing our investigations, we have verified that the lines of the hands have nothing in common with those of the medium” Geley wrote, mentioning that even though the hands were all smaller than Kluski’s he still had them examined by M. Bayle, a criminologist at the Paris police department, to confirm they had nothing in common. “The answer can scarcely leave room for doubt,” Geley concluded. “They present all the characters of human members—perfect form, lines of the hand, nails, crinkles of the skin, marks of bony protuberances, tendons, and sometimes even the small veins on the back of the hands. Nothing is wanting. We have shown these casts to artists, painters, sculptors, and molders, and to many medical men. The verdict of all has been unanimous—they are molds of human hands.” Geley also noted that traces of muscular contraction indicate that the hands were “alive.”

During September 1921, Geley traveled to Warsaw and replicated the hand molds, although the controls were not as strict as in Paris. He again returned to Warsaw during April and May 1922; and with the assistance of some respected Polish researchers, once more replicated the earlier results. During the 1922 experiments, Geley and the other scientists were able to better view the process. “We had the great pleasure of seeing the hands dipping into the paraffin,” he reported. “They were luminous, bearing points of light at the fingertips. They passed slowly before our eyes, dipped into the wax, moved in it for a few seconds, came out, still luminous, and deposited the glove against the hand of one of us. The whole operation took only two minutes at most.”

So, if not fraud or deception on the part of Kluski, what exactly were those “entities” or “invisible collaborators”? The debunkers can find some solace in the fact that Richet could not bring himself to declare a belief in spirits as he felt it was unscientific, even though he had witnessed a full materialization with another medium and thoroughly examined the materialized form before it disappeared. Moreover, in his 1923 book, he repeatedly spoke of the entitites as if they were spirits of the dead. “To ask a physician, a physicist, or a chemist to admit that a form that has a circulation of blood, warmth, and muscles, that exhales carbonic acid, has weight, speaks, and thinks, can issue from a human body is to ask of him an intellectual effort that is really painful,” he expressed his frustration.

Richet advanced a theory that the entities were secondary personalities in the subconscious of Kluski and other mediums; and that  secondary personality interacted with the subconscious of the sitters in producing the molds, even though he realized that such a theory, or hypothesis, seemed more far-fetched than the spirit explanation. “I find myself unable to adopt [the spirit hypothesis],” he further stated.  “Neverthe­less, I oppose it half-heartedly, for I am quite unable to bring forward any wholly satisfactory counter-theory.”

Geley also was reluctant to admit to a belief in spirits, and struggled to even use the word “spirits,” but he found the secondary personality/ subconscious hypothesis unsatisfactory to explain all of the phenomena. “…they declare themselves foreign to the Self; they claim to be distinct entities,” he wrote of the “secondary personalities” so crucial to the subconscious hypothesis. “Usually, at least in our day and in the West, they claim to be the ‘spirits’ of the dead and say that they only borrow from the medium the vital dynamism and organic elements which they need in order to act upon the material plane.” Like other more open-minded researchers, Geley wondered why this “secondary personality” was so intent on deceiving the primary personality of the medium, not only with Kluski but with all other mediums. Why should a secondary personality pretend to be a spirit?

Before he was killed in a plane crash on his way back to Paris from Warsaw during 1924, Geley declared his belief in spirits and the survival of consciousness in a scientific way. “It should be beyond doubt that the Self both pre-exists, and that it survives the grouping which it directs during one earth-life,” he wrote, “that it more particularly survives its lower objectification during this life. This may at least be admitted, if not as a mathematical certainty, at least as a high probability.”

Renowned British physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, who observed some of Geley’s experiments although not with the paraffin molds, referred to the paraffin molds as “a standing demonstration of some thing inexplicable by normal science…a permanent material record which can be examined at leisure, and which…are, as it were, a standing miracle.”

Richet repeated, in slightly different words, his earlier statement. “Yes, it is absurd; but no matter—it is true.”

Zeresenay Alemseged, a paleoanthropologist at the California Academy of Science in San Francisco, led the team that discovered the bones with cut marks on them. The team member who actually found the bones was archaeologist Shannon McPherron of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. In a report by Richard Lovett published online in Nature News on August 11, 2010, McPherron says that the early hominins were most likely not hunting. Probably they were using stone tools to scavenge kills made by lions or other predators. McPherron said in Nature News, “We’ve put this important, fundamental behavior into Lucy’s time.” The earliest previous evidence for stone tools accepted by mainstream scientists goes back only about 2.5 million years. McPherron said in Nature News, “We are pushing much deeper into our evolutionary past.”

The dating of the cut bones was not done directly on the bones themselves. There are no scientific methods that allow one to directly date bones more than a couple of hundred thousand years old. The primary method used to directly date bone, the radiocarbon method, can be applied only as far back as 100,000 years. Therefore the scientists dated the bones by the formations in which they were found. The bones were found between two layers: the upper layer was 3.24 million years old and the lower layer was 3.42 million years old. McPherron said in Nature News, “The best estimate is 3.39 million years.”

How did the scientists determine that the bones were cut by stone tools? Maybe the marks they thought were the marks of stone tools were made by teeth of carnivores, or by earth movements after the bones were fossilized. Chemical tests proved that the marks were made before the bones were fossilized. And microscopic examination showed that the most significant cut marks had a V-shaped cross section, something typical of marks made by a stone tool’s sharp edge. “The results are very clear,” said McPherron in Nature News.

So that’s the story we get from the mainstream scientists. The oldest evidence for cut marks on one bone now goes back about 3.4 million years. This would also be the age of the oldest known stone tools. They were supposedly used by the apeman Australopithecus afarensis to scavenge flesh from carcasses of animals killed by carnivores.

From the standpoint of your forbidden archaeologist, there are a few things wrong with this story.

First of all, this is not the first time that bones of this age with cut marks on them have been found. The Ethiopian bones are 3.4 million years old, which places them in the geological time division called the Pliocene, which goes from about 2 million to 5 million years ago. When I carefully studied the entire history of archaeology, I found many discoveries of cut bones in the Pliocene and documented them in my book For­bidden Archeology.

For example, in 1875 Giovanni Capellini, professor of geology at the University of Bologna in Italy, reported his discoveries of fossil whale bones with cut marks on them. The bones were of the extinct baleen whale Balaenotus, from the Late Pliocene period. In 1876, Capellini gave a more extensive report on his discoveries at a meeting of the International Congress of Prehistoric Anthropology and Archeology in Budapest, Hungary (Les traces de l’homme pliocène in Toscane, Congrès International d’Anthropologie et de Archéologie Préhistoriques, Budapest 1876, Compte Rendu, Vol. 1, pp. 46-62). Capellini said about the marks he observed on the fossil whale bones (pp. 49-50, my translation from the original French): “It is evident that for the specimen in question the marks were made by a human being that came upon the animal beached in shallow waters, and by means of a flint knife or with the aid of other instruments attempted to detach pieces of flesh.” He carefully ruled out the possibility that the marks had been made in any other way, such as by the teeth of sharks. Capellini, who had excavated cut bones of Balaenotus at Poggiarone, Italy, said (p. 51): “In the vicinity of the remains of the Balaenotus of Poggiarone, I collected some flint blades, lost in the actual beach deposits.” He added that “with those same flint implements I was able to reproduce on fresh whale bones the exact same marks found on the fossil whale bones.” Furthermore, Capellini stated (p.51): “I should point out that the bones of a human being found in 1856 by Abbey Deo Gratias in the Pliocene clays of Savona in Liguria [Italy] can be referred to approximately the same geological horizon as Poggiarone and other locales in Tuscany where I have found numerous whale fossils.” I discuss the case of the anatomically modern human bones found in the Pliocene at Savona in Forbidden Archeology (pp. 433-435). There are many such cases.

Bones with cut marks on them date back even further than the Pliocene. In Forbidden Archeology, I documented many cases of cut bones from the Miocene period, which goes from 5 million to 25 million years ago.

For example, on April 13, 1868, French scientist and military engineer Aime Laussedat informed the French Academy of Sciences that researcher E. Bertrand had sent him a fragment of a lower jaw of a rhinoceros from a pit near Billy, France. The jaw had on its lower surface a group of four parallel grooves about half-an-inch long. Laussedat said the marks were made by a stone tool used in a chopping fashion to remove flesh from the bone. Some scientists did not agree that the marks were made by a stone tool. But I tend to agree with the judgment of Laussedat. In his book Bones: Ancient Men and Modern Myths (New York, Academic Press, 1981, p. 105 ), archaeologist Lewis Binford said, “Marks from stone tools tend to be short, occurring in groups of parallel marks.” The marks on the rhinoceros jaw conform to this description. The marks are also in an appropriate place on the jaw bone. The bone was a lower jaw bone (mandible). Binford (p. 101) states that butchering marks on mandibles tend to be located on the lower surface, and that is where the marks on the Billy rhinoceros jaw were located. The jaw was found at a depth of 26 feet in a layer of calcareous sand. This layer was situated between strata belonging to the Middle Miocene, which goes from 11 to 15 million years ago.

Some Miocene discoveries of cut bone involve something more than just butchering marks. In the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Insti­tute of Great Britain and Ireland (1874, vol. 3, p. 127), Frank Calvert reported on a discovery he made in Turkey: “I have had the good fortune to discover, in the vicinity of the Dardanelles, conclusive proofs of the existence of man during the Miocene period of the tertiary age. From the face of a cliff composed of strata of that era, at a geological depth of eight hundred feet, I have extracted a fragment of the joint of a bone of either a dinotherium [Deinotherium] or a mastodon, on the convex side of which is deeply incised the unmistakable figure of a horned quadruped.” The Deinotheirum is an extinct member of the elephant family that existed as far back as the Middle Miocene. The bone also had engravings of other figures. Calvert added, “I have found in different parts of the same cliff, not far from the site of the engraved bone, a flint flake and some bones of animals, fragmented longitudinally, obviously by the hand of man for the purpose of extracting the marrow, according to the practice of primitive races.”

So the recent announcement in Nature of the first discovery of cut bones from the Pliocene is not really the first such discovery. There have been many other such discoveries of cut bones from the Pliocene and even the Miocene. These discoveries were accompanied by discoveries of stone tools, and even bones of humans like us. If humans like us existed in the Pliocene and Miocene, that means that it could be humans like us, not Australopithecus afarensis, who made the cut marks on the bones found in Ethiopia. It adds up to a picture of extreme human antiquity, quite different from what we read in today’s textbooks of archaeology.

Michael A. Cremo is the author, with Richard Thompson, of the underground classic Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race. He has also written Human Devolution: A Vedic Alternative to Darwin’s Theory (see www.humandevolution.com).

Throughout history and prehistory, individuals have momentarily seen beyond the material world into the non-material. They peer more deeply into creation and perceive non-physical spiraling energy; they see the results of invisible vortices that create matter and destroy and create again endlessly. The same dynamic is everywhere, from the galactic down to submicrosopic scale, and visionaries have left its imprint on human culture. The clues they bequeath range from the spirals of Celtic art to a Native American symbol to Maori carvings of clockwise and counterclockwise spirals.

Maybe some of those clues are reminders of civilizations that were more technologically advanced in understanding the universal processes. Today certain enlightened engineers are studying how to build electrical generators that tap into the background energy of the universe by employing vortex action.

Toby Grotz has a fuller understanding of this topic than most. When I first met him at the 1986 Tesla Conference in Colorado Springs, he was a young, power plant engineer who had already made a difference in the unorthodox energy scene. Two years earlier he and physicist Elizabeth Rauscher had pulled together a centennial celebration of the electrical genius Nikola Tesla’s arrival in America. (I hadn’t attended that first Tesla Conference in Colorado, but have written in this column about its historic public demonstration of John Bedini’s battery-charging invention.)

A few years later, Toby Grotz was the driving force behind forming the Institute for New Energy, then organizing two landmark public conferences held by the I.N.E. in Denver and a private retreat in the mountains for a select group of scientists. And he and colleagues Ron Kovac and Tim Binder were doing laboratory experiments to test the concepts of the late Walter Russell (1871-1963)—especially to check Russell’s claims of transmutation of elements.

Grotz had the know-how and instruments to test new energy inventions, so the I.N.E. sent him on a world tour in 1993 while the organization had funding from a wealthy couple in Colorado. On the tour he visited notable inventors in the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Switzerland, Austria, England, and India to encourage them to bring their inventions and theories to the 1994 International Symposium on New Energy. The nuclear engineer/New Energy inventor Paramahamsa Tewari impressed him so much that he returned to India several times. He tested prototypes of Tewari’s magnetic Space Power Generator—now called the Reactionless Generator—and built a website for Tewari (www.tewari.org).

The bond between East and West—Karwar in India, and Kansas, USA—is not merely Tewari’s and Grotz’ common interest in the mechanics of a more-output-than-input electrical generator. It’s much more. The title of a book authored by Tewari sums it up: Spiritual Foundations. Before getting to Tewari’s invention, we’ll look at some insights that prepared Toby Grotz for fully appreciating Tewari’s contributions to the emerging science.

From Tesla and Russell to Tewari

As a young man Grotz’ search for answers took him far and wide—from sites with remnants of Anasazi culture to an Open University course in Sanskrit. He learned to respect the Vedic wisdom passed down through the ages. In our conversation he reminded me that Tesla had connected with ancient knowledge as well as mystical experience of his own.

Many readers know about Tesla’s most famous mind-blowing moment. One afternoon in 1882 in Budapest as the sun was setting, he strolled with a friend in the park. He was inspired to recite poetry from the German artist/physicist Goethe. Suddenly, in his mind, Tesla saw how energy moves in the universe; and since a technical problem was already in his mind, he vividly perceived its solution. Grotz believes Tesla may have entered into a state of Samadhi or heightened awareness, one of the results of which was the invention of alternating current motors.

When Grotz discovered the great inventor’s legacy, an aspect of it mystified him. In Tesla’s May 13, 1907 presentation “Man’s Greatest Achievement” Tesla said matter comes from a primary substance that fills all space, “the Akasha or luminiferous ether, which is acted upon by the life-giving Prana or creative force, calling into existence in never-ending cycles all things…” Grotz wondered where Tesla found those words, since western physics lacked phrases to describe the background energy of the universe.

Research showed that Tesla had attended Swami Vivekananda’s lectures in New York. They also met at a dinner party. Vivekananda was the first Hindu teacher to tour the United States and present the wisdom of ancient Vedic teachings.

“Tesla had the vision—of how matter forms from energy—but he didn’t have the words to describe it until he heard Swami Vivekananda,” Toby Grotz says.

Since Tesla obviously knew about the never-ending universal cycles of creation, Grotz once wrote Walter Russell’s widow, Lao, and asked her if Tesla and Russell ever met. She replied that they had met and Tesla had advised Russell to lock up his information in the Smithsonian museum for a thousand years until humankind is ready for it. Grotz figured that the information Tesla considered so advanced is Russell’s theory of light and electromagnetics and their relation to unlimited power supplies and transmutation of elements.

Artist/philosopher Walter Russell had a prolonged experience of heightened awareness in 1921. He saw how creation—matter, and the forces of nature—manifested via what he called the wave. His painting The Wave of Creation conveys his vision of those forces, and his drawings show the life-death cycles of small-scale electric currents and large-scale galactic processes. The wave pumps space through endless cycles of compression and expansion, gravitation, and radiation.

Russell taught that the universe was founded on the unifying principle of rhythmic, balanced interchange. To apply that knowledge, he built experimental apparatus. He also created a spiraling periodic chart of elements that predicted the location on the chart of at least four elements—years before physical, in-the-lab discoveries of them.

Navaho Rug Shows Wave of Creation

After immersing himself in Russell’s teachings about the wave, Grotz noticed that if viewed from the front, in the schematic form of a technical blueprint, the wave seems identical to patterns found in Navaho weavings. In a fascinating 1992 paper, The Navaho and the Bhuddist, Grotz wrote that the symbols repeat the front view of the vortex motions of those simultaneous forces of creation and disintegration described by Russell.

“The Navaho rug symbols and the wave explain the dual wave- and particle-like nature of atomic physics. Viewed end on, the symbol becomes the yin-yang sign of eastern philosophy. It is also a pictorial representation of zero point energy and scalar fields.”

Grotz speculated that ancient shamans had also been able to visualize the wave of creation. Then, understanding the mechanics of nature, they could possibly have developed technology that used forces of nature to benefit their tribe.

He presented his speculations to Thomas Bearden (see Jan.-Feb. 2011, #85 Atlantis Rising), who pointed out that use of sound vibrations could accomplish the same “scalar wave” technology that well-known inventors may have done electrically and mechanically. Bearden said that through chanting, the wave of creation could be manipulated to cause physical effects. In that case, causing rain by a rain dance in the southwest desert, moving large stone blocks by manipulating gravity, and instantaneously healing the sick could all be accomplished through chanting.

Grotz pondered an 1891 speech by Tesla to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers and saw it as prophesying the potential inherent in the wave of creation. “Ere many generations pass, our machinery will be driven by a power obtainable at any point in the universe.…Throughout space there is energy…it is a mere question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature.”

Seeing, as Russell had, that the wave precedes matter and is the non-material fabric of sub-space existing in a dimension removed from our view, Grotz was not surprised by what he heard from leading inventors on his 1993 world tour. At the Electrochemical Laboratory in Ibaraki, the late Shiuji Inomata, Ph.D., was working on a Japanese government funded project to build a magnetic device called the N-machine. Dr. Inomata told Grotz how he himself first encountered the non-standard concepts. Inomata and his Japanese colleagues had been researching rapid battery charging and realized that more power was coming out of their batteries than going in. To explain it, Inomata developed a theory about energy coming from the so-called vacuum of space. He called it shadow energy.

Other scientists Grotz met on the tour also knew that modern science leaves much to be discovered. In India he met the researcher who most impressed him.

Tewari’s Space Vortex Theory

While Paramahamsa Tewari is a Sanskrit scholar and studied ancient Vedic texts, he’s also educated in standard engineering and physics. However, he didn’t let education block him from rediscovering ancient knowledge and building on it. While integrating his worldview, he was in correspondence with physicists such as the famous John Archibald Wheeler (who coined the term black hole for a region of space-time from which nothing, not even light, can escape), and inventor of the N-Machine Dr. Bruce de Palma.

Tewari developed a Space Vortex Theory and the mathematics to describe how an electron is formed from the ether or space. He’s described space not as an empty void but instead as a non-material fluid existing almost infinitely as the most basic substratum of the universe.

It’s not just theorizing. If an electrical engineer understands how electrons are created like standing waves in a sea of energy, he or she is more likely to successfully develop a free-energy machine. Those are my words. Tewari’s words are: “We have erred, though unknowingly, in our design of electrical generators and have remained in error for more than two centuries.”

He says that ever since Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction and electrical generators based on it were invented, the generators’ electrical output has been limited by laws of science—the Law of Energy Conservation and Lenz’s Law. “But, through a new Reaction Less Generator (RLG), under development for some time, efficiency much higher than 100 percent has been achieved.”

Tewari reports that a small motor-RLG set which has a DC motor coupled to an AC RLG is being tested, and the ratios of input power to the drive motor and output from the RLG are graphed. Even though the generator set is running at only a moderate speed of 1,750 revolutions per minute, the ratio of output from the RLG to its input is 160 percent (from the lowest and highest graphs). “With extrapolation it can be shown that at 3,000 r/m, the efficiency of the M-RLG set will reach 275 percent.”

In a recent reply to Sepp Hasslberger, http://blog.hasslberger.com, Tewari expressed optimism that in the near future electrical power will be generated by reaction-less generators such as his Space Power Generator (SPG).

“Clearly, such a system of free power generation has been missed out for nearly one and half centuries since Faraday’s discovery of electromagnetic induction and formulation of the Lenz’s Law.” (Lenz said an induced electrical current always opposes the motion or change causing it.)

Tewari says his generator is different. “Once armature reaction gets nullified, no counter torque will be experienced by the prime mover and it’s all free power except for the windage and frictional losses. Imagine the savings in the input power to the prime mover coupled to a loaded generator!”

The RLG, recently tested by Grotz, is constructed in a unique manner that cancels the effect of Lenz’s Law. He describes it as an “Infinite Gain Amplifier; “as the load is increased, there’s no corresponding increase in input power. Grotz is convinced this is a new phenomenon and an advancement in the sciences of electrical engineering and physics.

For now, Paramahamsa Tewari is trying his best to get financing from government agencies in India. Will his space-power converter soon help humankind perceive the churning ocean of energy surrounding us?

Jeane Manning’s websites are http://changing power.net and http://breakthroughpower.net. Her co-authored book Breakthrough Power is now out in a 2011 updated edition.

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Any number of New Age books and websites now purport to contain accounts of Native American interactions with ETs and other beings—be it through direct physical contact, ethereal shamanism or other means—but a serious look at the subject of ancient encounters requires sources that predate modern influences.

This author had an early interest in such Indian/Native American stories because my maternal grandmother in rural Arkansas used to talk about such things. Because she considered herself and our family to be of Cherokee descent, I was naturally drawn to the stories of that tribe of Native Americans. Her mother, my great-grandmother, used to regale us kids with stories of legendary Cherokee figures—The Ridge, Stand Watie, John Ross—and told us about tribal legends as well. Unfortunately, I was too young to write down, or to remember, the details of those strange tales, and later I was too involved with teenage concerns to tape-record them while my grandmother was still living. But, with that interest in mind, I later visited the Eastern Cherokees in Cherokee, North Carolina, where I found an old book by nineteenth century anthropologist, James Mooney. Reading his work reinforced many of the old stories.

In Myths of the Cherokees and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees, originally published in 1888, Mooney presents information about how one Native American tribe may have encountered aliens and other mysterious creatures, recording these accounts as campfire stories and legends. As an anthropologist with the Smithsonian Institution, Mooney spent the years of 1887 through 1890 living with the Cherokees of North Carolina, listening to their stories, recording their myths, legends, and sacred formulas. Because Mooney’s works were published long before the age of flight and even before the Great Airship Flap of the late 1890’s, we can consider these reports as untainted by more modern interest in UFOs and aliens of all stripes.

Encounters of the Third Kind?

Of particular interest are Cherokee legends of strange flying creatures. As with Ezekiel and other ancient witnesses to strange objects and beings descending from the sky, we can readily interpret the old stories in light of the thousands of UFO encounters reported in the modern age. One of Mooney’s interviewees, an old chief named Swimmer, for example, told the story of “What the Stars Are Like.”

“There are different opinions about the stars. Some say they are balls of light, others say they are human, but most people say they are living creatures covered with luminous fur or feathers. “One night a hunting party camping in the mountains noticed two lights like large stars moving along the top of a distant ridge. They wondered and watched until the light disappeared on the other side. The next night, and the next, they saw the lights again moving along the ridge, and after talking over the matter decided to go on the morrow and try to learn the cause. In the morning they started out and went until they came to the ridge, where, after searching some time, they found two strange creatures about so large (making a circle with outstretched arms), with round bodies covered with fine fur or downy feathers, from which small heads stuck out like the heads of terrapins. As the breeze played upon these feathers, showers of sparks flew out. “The hunters carried the strange creatures back to the camp, intending to take them home to the settlements on their return. They kept them several days and noticed that every night they would grow bright and shine like great stars, although by day they were only balls of gray fur, except when the wind stirred and made the sparks fly out. They kept very quiet, and no one thought of their trying to escape, when, on the seventh night, they suddenly rose from the ground like balls of fire and were soon above the tops of the trees. Higher and higher they went, while the wondering hunters watched, until at last they were only two bright points of light in the dark sky, and then the hunters knew that they were stars.”

Interpretation of this story depends upon one’s viewpoint. A folklorist or mythologist might claim that the tale merely serves to satisfy a primitive society’s curiosity about the nature of the heavenly lights. But a UFOlogist can well imagine that an actual encounter event might have occurred first, with the explanation of the stars coming later.

The initial sighting of lights moving along the ridge could be compared to current reports of UFO landings, or of the recent ubiquitous “orbs,” and the fuzzy, rotund star-men, to extraterrestrial visitors. The Cherokee hunting party may have indeed come upon alien creatures with reptilian heads (or with hard, head-covering helmets that could look similar to a tortoise’s), dressed in pressurized suits of a shiny, reflective or radiant material that crinkled as the creatures moved or the wind blew. Static electricity or defensive systems could explain the sparks, which may appear to the natives to be driven by wind. They would have no concept of an advanced technology able to generate sparks or illumination at will.

When the two creatures escaped through whatever means and rose into the sky, the Cherokees would have seen them disappear into the distance. A primitive observer, knowing nothing else about cosmology, could logically conclude that since these shining man-like creatures went back into the sky, they must be stars, and thus by extension, all stars are such creatures.

An open-minded modern observer, armed with more sophisticated knowledge of the universe and its phenomena, must keep open the possibility that the ancient Cherokees of the story were reporting an encounter with aliens, or at least some sort of beings with advanced technologies.

Encounters of the Second Kind?

According to Mooney, the North Carolina Cherokees had more local legends than did all their relatives in the rest of their vast ancient territory. This may be affected by the more extreme topology in western North Carolina—taller mountains, darker valleys, numerous bald knobs, dangerous crevasses, rivers, waterfalls, whirlpools—or merely because more strangeness does occur in the mountains of the Tar Heel State. Several of these legends and their locales carry on the tradition of strange creatures that today would be classified as Close Encounters of the Second Kind.

“TSUKILÛÑNÛÑ’YÏ: ‘Where he alighted,’ two, small bald spots on the side of the mountain at the head of Little Snowbird creek, southwest of Robbinsville, in Graham county. A mysterious being, having the form of a giant, with head blazing like the sun, was once seen to fly through the air, alight at this place, and stand for some time looking out over the landscape. It then flew away, and when the people came afterward to look, they found the herbage burned from the ground where it had stood. They do not know who it was, but some think it may have been the Sun.”

From the UFOlogical viewpoint, this “giant” could have been a flying craft of some kind, its landing legs causing the Cherokees to think it a giant humanoid. The “head blazing like the sun” could describe a polished metal nose or fuselage, an illuminated forward cabin, a retro rocket or a nose cone glowing from re-entry. The fact that this mysterious being stood “…for some time looking out over the landscape…” suggests a reconnaissance mission, and the burnt herbage the remnant of a powered landing and ascent. In our modern times, Ted Phillips of MUFON has researched and documented nearly 4000 UFO landing events that left behind burnt debris and various chemicals. There is no reason to believe that prehistoric UFO landings would not have had similar physical effects.

Possible Physical Artifacts

Most ancient peoples and tribes told stories of monsters, and the Cherokee were no different. In particular, their legends of the serpent-like monster, the Uktena, describe an almost robot-like creature:  “…as large around as a tree trunk, with horns on its head, and a bright, blazing crest like a diamond upon its forehead, and scales glittering like sparks of fire. It has rings or spots of color along its whole length, and can not be wounded except by shooting in the seventh spot from the head, because under this spot are its heart and its life. The blazing diamond is called Ulûñsû’tî, ‘Transparent,’ and he who can win it may become the greatest wonder worker of the tribe, but it is worth a man’s life to attempt it, for whoever is seen by the Uktena is so dazed by the bright light that he runs toward the snake instead of trying to escape.” “Of all the daring warriors who have started out in search of the Ulûñsû’tî, only Âgän-uni’tsï ever came back successful. The East Cherokee still keep the one which he brought. It is like a large transparent crystal, nearly the shape of a cartridge bullet, with a blood-red streak running through the center from top to bottom.”

In modern technology, transparent crystals often form the basis of laser-driven energy weapons. A transparent crystal with a red streak running through it suggests an electronic component with an internal wire for power or other electronic connection. Could it have happened that a Cherokee warrior encountered a robotic alien device or landing craft having a dazzling bright light—the Uktena—attacked it, and broke off a part? If that artifact still exists, it would be of great interest to science, and proof of alien visitation.

Cherokee Abductions?

All over the world, ancient cultures spoke of hidden worlds adjacent to our own, where the ravages of primitive life were salved, where peace reigned and food was plentiful. Some of the Cherokee legends Mooney recorded also tell of offers by strange creatures to remove the Native Americans from their villages and take them to live immortal lives of plenty and peace. One such story is this:

“Long ago, long before the Cherokee were driven from their homes in 1838, the people on Valley river and Hiwassee heard voices of invisible spirits in the air calling and warning them of wars and misfortunes which the future held in store, and inviting them to come and live with the Nûñnë’hï, the Immortals, in their homes under the mountains and under the waters. For days the voices hung in the air, and the people listened until they heard the spirits, say ‘If you would live with us, gather everyone in your townhouses and fast there for seven days and no one must raise a shout or a warwhoop in all that time. Do this and we shall come and you will see us and we shall take you to live with us.’ ”

The people were afraid of the evils that were to come, and they knew that the Immortals of the mountains and the waters were happy forever, so they counciled in their townhouses and decided to go with them. Those of Anisgayâ’yï town came all together into their townhouse and prayed and fasted for six days. On the seventh day there was a sound from the distant mountains, and it came nearer and grew louder until a roar of thunder was all about the townhouse and they felt the ground shake under them. Now they were frightened, and despite the warning some of them screamed out. The Nûñnë’hï, who had already lifted up the townhouse with its mound to carry it away, were startled by the cry and let a part of it fall to the earth, where now we see the mound of Së`tsï. They steadied themselves again and bore the rest of the townhouse, with all the people in it, to the top of Tsuda’ye`lûñ’yï (Lone peak), near the head of Cheowa, where we can still see it, changed long ago to solid rock, but the people are invisible and immortal.”

Again, a UFOlogist or Fortean may choose to interpret this story as a report of the voluntary abduction of some Native Americans by a power that “came nearer and grew louder until a roar of thunder was all about the townhouse and they felt the ground shake under them.” To a modern reader, this sounds much like a huge craft coming over the village and lifting up a portion of it to take away.

Encounters or Tall Tales?

Although some legends and campfire stories can possibly be attributed to story-telling to explain certain natural phenomena, these few Cherokee tales contain some factors that should lead researchers to study their reality further:

Reptilian creatures in shiny, sparkling suits, captured after nights of observing lights along a ridge; beings that float up and away, disappearing into the distant sky.

A giant with a blazing head, which landed on a hilltop, surveilled the area for a while, and then took off, leaving a burned area at the landing site.

An alien artifact, a transparent crystal with a thin red wire down its center, the size of a rifle cartridge, taken by a warrior who fought a robot-like entity and broke off a piece of it.

A loud thundering noise that grew ever closer, finally shaking the ground of a village townhouse, and raising up a portion of that structure, taking it away.

Standing alone, each strange story might be mildly interesting, but put together as pieces of an unfinished puzzle, in my estimation they describe a primitive people’s encounters with strange beings with great power.

Material in a complex, man-made, underwater structure in the Bahamas has been carbon dated to over 20,000 years BCE. Researchers for the Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.) have been investigating the underwater remains of what appears to be a collapsed multi-room building. Originally reported in Atlantis Rising #77 (September/October 2009), the investigation by the husband-and-wife archaeological team of Drs. Greg and Lora Little has culminated in the newly-released Carbon 14 dating report.

Located in an area known as “Pino Turolla’s Column,” the site, Greg Little reports, has already been re-covered with sand. Locals first found the structure and notified the Littles who made several follow-up expeditions. Clearly man-made, the building’s foundation has mitered limestone corners and other debris inside the outer walls. In the new dating report, according to an A.R.E. press release, a sample of beach rock from a long, straight foundation wall was carbon dated to between 21,520 BCE and 20,610 BCE. Conventional archaeological wisdom holds that the oldest dates for humans in the area go back to only about 1,000 BCE.

The dated sample, recovered by other independent investigators working with A.R.E., was forwarded to Little for dating. Even though the beach rock material is obviously older than the building in which it was found, it is still a very significant find. “Beach rock forms at the edge of the shoreline,” Little explained to Atlantis Rising, “where the waves move back and forth across the beach.” The rock formed along the ocean’s edge, and, thus, before it could be used for building material, it had to be moved some distance. The sea levels where the beach rock formed were about 300 feet below where they are today. The rock had to be moved before the sea levels rose, a process which began circa 15,000 BCE. “We have to assume they didn’t go underwater and pull these slabs up. Around 4,000 BCE the sea level was about 15 feet lower than today, so by then this structure would have been essentially at the shoreline. The conclusion is that the structure was built on high ground sometime between 21,000 BC and well before 4,000 BCE.”

Unfortunately, any further investigation will have to await permits which may not be forthcoming any time soon. The spot is in a busy area with a great deal of boat traffic. Investigators have been exploring the region since the late 1960s and have located many unusual underwater—apparently manmade— formations, but this is the first site to be carbon dated and to a time long before the last ice age ended, strongly indicating that, contrary to standard academic theory, a highly developed pre-ice-age culture once lived off the coast of the Bahamas and operated throughout the region.

The non-profit Association for Research and Enlightenment was founded by Edgar Cayce in 1931. A.R.E.’s teams conduct annual expeditions off the Bahamas coast in search of the remnants of sophisticated pre-ice-age culture.

For more information just visit EdgarCayce.org.

The familiar image of stone age man, clad, in skins and dragging his woman by the hair is in dire need of a reset. Far from being an ignorant savage, it is clear he was, at the least, a great engineer, responsible for many megalithic structures which would be difficult to reproduce today. Now, new evidence shows that he was an amazing tunnel builder as well.

German archaeologist Heinrich Kusch says that the remains of a vast network of tunnels beneath hundreds of neolithic settlements from Europe to Scotland to Turkey has been found and partially mapped. In a new book Secrets of the Underground—Door to an Ancient World, Kusch argues for the existence of an enormous network of such tunnels. Parts of the ancient catacombs still exist today, over 12,000 years later. Some sites go back over 30,000 years. Seven hundred meters of tunnel have been exposed in Germany’s state of Bavaria. Three hundred and fifty meters worth have been unearthed in Styria, Austria. But that, Kusch claims, is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

The networks, some believe, were intended to protect humans from predators. Others think some of the linked tunnels were used like highways are today, making it possible to travel safely even in times of war or dangerous weather. Much of what remains today is quite small,  barely capable of accommodating modern human explorers. In some cases there is more room and even seating space for visitors. Many of the tunnels had been sealed off by the medieval church, apparently concerned about a heathen legacy. Not all tunnels link up, but many do, and the existence of a massive pre-ice-age network seems clear.

ASTEROID SAIL TO SAVE THE EARTH?

Scientists at NASA say there is almost no need to worry about the Asteroid Apophis hitting Earth in 2036. The 46-million-ton space rock will swing by first in 2029, and if it doesn’t pass through a 600 meter “keyhole” area then, when it comes back in 2036, it will miss us. If it does hit the keyhole, however, then seven years later it could make quite a mess of life on Earth. Now some Chinese scientists are saying why take a chance.

Shengping Gong, Junfeng Li, and Xiangyuan Zeng of Tsinghua University in Beijing say we could launch a small satellite with a solar sail that could rendezvous with Apophis and change its orbit. It would be tricky, something like shooting a gnat at a few million miles, but it could be done. Of course there is the possibility that the hit might make the asteroid go way off course and end up somewhere totally unexpected, but that is not our problem, and it sounds like more fun than a video game.

In the meantime a comet from deep space is zooming toward our neighborhood this year. Not to worry says NASA; the comet Elenin is not coming anywhere close to Earth. It should miss us by a few million miles. And as for a possible collision between Elenin and asteroid 2005 YU55, scientists says it won’t cause either one to collide Earth. So for now, Earth does not need to worry about space rocks and there is at least one less thing to worry about. We wish we could say as much for the economy.

Hydrogen Energy Source Discovered at the Bottom of the Ocean

Abundant power from hydrogen at the bottom of the ocean may be available soon. That is the implication of new exploration undertaken with deep sea submersibles by researchers from Germany’s Max Planck Institute.

Right now thousands of scientists from around the world are looking for clean, renewable forms of energy; and though often thwarted by prejudice and outmoded thinking based on a perceived scarcity of resources, many unexpected potential solutions to the world’s energy problems seem to be emerging. Intensive efforts to harness hydrogen as a readily available fuel has spurred development of hydrogen fuel cells, but until recently a great living source for such cells had gone unnoticed.

It turns out, according to the science journal Nature, that in hydrothermal vents deep below the ocean, mussels, in great beds, have their own on-board ‘fuel cells.’ Indeed, symbiotic bacteria in the mussels have been shown to use hydrogen as an energy source, and on a significant scale. Researchers believe that perhaps soon we will learn how to tap such hydrothermal vent symbiosis as a powerful renewable source of ener­gy for the human world above the water, thus making it possible for civilization as we know it to stay afloat a little longer.

The argument over global warming has become even more like a theological debate. In sermons defending their chosen position, advocates on all sides do not hesitate to invoke higher authority. Now a new report by scientists at NASA and Pennsylvania State University argues that the sorry state of Earth’s environment might prompt an advanced alien invader to kill off the human race in order to protect the universe itself from potential future harm. Such an action might even win the approval of many in positions of influence on this planet.

The report, of course, was written by fervent advocates of the notion that climate change on Earth is the work of evil humans. It seems just as likely, though, that representatives from more advanced worlds would be amused by the childish arrogance of a primitive race which deludes itself into believing that it is the preeminent power in a world existing solely at the mercy of vast cosmic forces which it has not yet begun to appreciate.

In a bygone, more primitive, time, fire-and-brimstone preachers warned sinners of a coming retribution from on high. The preachers may not have been right, so far, but who can say what will happen next?

THE ARROW OF TITAN

In Kurt Vonnegut’s classic science fiction novel The Sirens of Titan, a space explorer from the distant planet Tralfamadore is stranded on Titan, one of the moons of Saturn. Waiting for a spare part from his home planet, he is left to watch planet Earth from afar. The story’s crowning irony, is the notion that Earth’s history unfolds as it does in order to provide signals to the stranded traveler. The Great Wall of China, for example, is actually just a glyph in the language of the traveler, letting him know the status of his needed part.

Strangely, as life imitates art, scientists on Earth are now observing what looks like a glyph on, of all places, Titan, though no one sees any meaning in it other than an indication of the shape of Titan’s weather. A giant arrow the size of Texas is clearly visible, but NASA says it is noth­ing but a “stenciling effect” caused by methane rainfall. Studying Titan’s weather, it is hoped, will lend new insight into climate change on Earth.

No spare parts for Earth’s climate, however, are expected any time soon.

A YOUTHENING MOON?

King Arthur in Camelot was said not to age but to “youthen.” Maybe that is what we should say of the moon.

The moon, we are now being told, is younger than we thought. No one, however, is saying it was born yesterday. Instead of 4.5 billion years old, astronomers are talking 4.3 billion (about 200 million years younger). That is the outcome of new dating studies on rocks brought back by the Apollo 16 astronauts.

It may not sound like a big deal to most of us. What, after all, is a couple hundred million years among friends? But the finding published in the journal Nature in August has some scientists excited. Three different dating methods all produced the same result.

It had been thought the moon resulted from the collision of a Mars-sized body with Earth which left it covered with magma for some time. Now it looks like the moon may have come to be in some other way. It is safe to say, though, that there was no green cheese phase.

Black holes may not be as difficult to escape as we once thought. In fact, according to research at England’s University of York, gravity itself may not actually be one of the fundamental forces of nature.

Up until now, the conventional view has been that black holes are objects in space which are so massive and compact that their gravity actually bends space itself and swallows up anything that gets too close. No information, it has been thought, can escape a black hole.

In an August issue of Physical Review Letters, however, Professor Samuel Braunstein and Dr. Manas Petra claim that they have data indicating that information does indeed leak from black holes, but they can explain it. Gravity, they say, must be thought of in an entirely new way. Space, time, and even gravity, according to the new thinking, can be understood as properties of a deeper theory of quantum mechanics. If they are right, the implications could be revolutionary.

For now, though, even if you have the chance don’t go anywhere near a black hole.

God Particle May Not Exist

The God particle may not exist! That is the late-breaking news from Switzerland.

That is not to imply, by the way, that God does not exist. It does mean that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN research center, the giant atomic accelerator in Switzerland, may need to find new work, since the main thing it was built to do, at a cost of many billions of dol­lars, was to ferret out what has been called the Higgs Boson or “God Particle.”

According to the standard model of physics, the Higgs (named after British physicist Peter Higgs) was supposed to account for all the previously unaccounted-for properties of matter, like mass and energy. Just a few months ago physicists thought they were hot on the trail of the Higgs. They were wrong, though, and now acknowledge that the trail they were following has petered out.

The news for the LHC is not all bad though, say physicists. Research director Sergio Bertolucci told a conference at Mumbai’s Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in August that if the Higgs did not exist “its absence will point the way to new physics”—one which perhaps may find that God is not a particle.

13-Year-Old Discovers Energy Secret in Fibonacci Number

Aidan Dwyer, a 13-year-old 7th grader from Northport, New York, has wowed the energy-research community with a new discovery relating solar energy to the Fibonacci sequence. When solar panels are arranged as actual tree leaves, which follow a pattern named after an eighteenth-century Italian naturalist, they produce from 20 to 50% more energy than when the panels are set up in the standard manner.

Guided by the orderly way in which branches spiral upward about a tree trunk, Aidan realized that the natural pattern was one which optimized the collection of sunlight by tree leaves, yielding the greatest return over time. Standard solar arrays must be either moved mechanically to follow the sun—a costly, energy-consuming process—or placed in fixed positions which are most productive only during brief intervals when the sun is shining directly upon them.

The Fibonacci series is a variation on the famous golden ratio pattern which has been observed to guide the patterns of nature from the least to the greatest—from chambered nautilus to spiral nebulae, from sunflower to the human body. Represented by the Greek letter phi, the golden ratio corresponds to the ratio 1.618 to 1. Another way of putting it is that when a line is divided at the phi point, the ratio of the smaller part to the greater part is the same as the greater part is to the entire line. In a Fibonacci number series, the succeeding number is equal to the sum of the two preceding numbers. Beginning at 1, the following sequence results: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34… Many have argued that the pattern is the virtual fingerprint of God, clearly revealing the presence of order in the universe. Widespread application of the golden ratio and oth­er high geometric harmonies in classic ancient art and temple architecture is strong evidence for great advancement in ancient civilization; whereas the chaotic nature of modern civilization, obedient to no discernible order, can be taken as evidence of widespread decay.

For his research and discovery, Aiden has been picked by the American Museum of Natural History as the top winner of its 2011 Young Nat­uralist Awards. We expect to hear more from him as the future unfolds.

Among the most rare examples were anthropomorphic depictions, and the only enduring specimen is Sauk County’s so-called “Man Mound,” near Baraboo, 40 miles north of the state capital at Madison. Originally about 214 feet long by 48 feet high, it is the representation of a faceless man wearing a horned helmet and skillfully molded into the northern slope of a low hill overlooking a declining prairie land. This mutilated survivor is one among a sparse collection still scattered throughout the state. These bizarre effigies were the earth artworks of an unknown people, who occupied the territories from the Mississippi River to Lake Michigan, from the third century BC to the fifth century AD, referred to by archaeologists as the “Hopewell,” after the farmer on whose land the earthworks were first recognized as prehistoric structures.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, construction engineers laid Sauk County’s first paved road and erased the man mound below the knees. Local citizens were outraged by such callous destruction and formed a foundation for the preservation of what remained of the desecrated terraglyph. A similar, although not identical, effigy of a human giant could still be seen in neighboring LaValle until the mid-1930s, when an irrigation project buried it under thirty feet of water.

Today, the Sauk County Man Mound is maintained as a wayside park. A fifteen-foot-high observation tower affords visitors an improved perspective of its configuration. When French immigrants were settling in the hamlet of Baraboo during the early 1830s, the resident Sauk Indians still revered the geoglyph as the sacred image of Wakt’cexi, an anthropomorphic water-spirit of gigantic proportions, who saved their ancestors by leading them to safety on Turtle Island (North America) after the Great Flood drowned their original “lodge place,” or homeland in the “Sunrise Sea,” i.e., the Atlantic Ocean.

The Man Mound’s European counterpart is found in the south of England, not far from the city of Bristol. Known as the Wilmington Giant, it is the chalk outline of another faceless man cut into the slope of a hill and reliably dated to the Late Bronze Age, circa 1200 BC. It, too, originally wore a horned helmet, which was effaced during the early nineteenth century. About three times as long as the Wisconsin effigy, it nonetheless has the same orientation on the north side of a hill overlooking a low-lying area. Both the Baraboo and British giants were meant by their creators to be viewed from a distance and appear in perfect proportion at ground level. Seen at altitude, either hill-figure elongates into distortion, demonstrating that the makers of these terraglyphs understood the principles of applied proportion through foreshortening—an artistic convention supposedly first discovered during the fifteenth century Italian Renaissance.

Despite the many centuries alleged by mainstream archaeologists to separate these fundamentally similar earthworks, a relationship of some kind does seem implicit in their shared details. Might Late Bronze Age Britons have journeyed as far as the Upper Mississippi River Valley to raise the Man Mound? Or were both effigies independently landscaped by neither ancient Britons nor prehistoric Hopewell Indians, but by thirteenth century BC survivors sailing eastward to Europe and westward to North America from a centralized natural catastrophe?

These questions may be answered by the Wisconsin effigy’s location relative to the ancient mining that occurred in the Upper Great Lakes Region. The world’s highest-grade copper ore was extracted in many tens of thousands of tons from circa 3000 BC to 1200 BC and shipped down the long-since-dried-up river systems that prehistorically spread throughout the state, connecting with the Mississippi River. Significantly, when the Wilmington Giant was originally cut into its hillside, Britain was known as the Tin Isle for its abundant deposits of that metal. Copper combined with tin (and zinc) produces bronze; both the English and American terraglyphs probably date to the European Bronze Age.

The Sauk Indians themselves were also known by their Algonquian tribal name—the Osakiwug, or “People of the Outlet,” a reference to their landing on the eastern shores of North America after the Great Flood. It seems more than ironic that the Man Mound’s companion earthwork at LaValle, likewise a memorial to the deluge, should have also suffered a modern flood, when a modern irrigation project covered it with five fathoms of water.

Less than a day’s hike from the Baraboo terraglyph is Devil’s Lake. Known to countless generations of Native Americans from all over the Middle West as Spirit Lake, early nineteenth century religious zealots from Europe demoted the resident Indians’ deity to the Arch Fiend, together with his lake. Although only three miles across, it is almost completely surrounded by high cliffs of purple quartzite that encircle the body of water in an azure halo at sunset during certain times of the year. This naturally numinous aura was not lost on its earliest human inhabitants. They fashioned magnificent earth-sculptures near its shoreline. At the western end of the lake may still be seen the prehistoric effigy mounds of several bears.

On the opposite shore, the graceful bioglyph of a gull angles its 80-foot wingspread parallel to the water’s edge. At the center of the bird’s head stands a remarkable stone—a large, somewhat cubic quartz. Its dark purple stripes alternate in a tight pattern of much lighter vein, generating a visually vibratory effect, as though the boulder was rippling with earth energies. Toward the middle of the bird mound lie the half-buried ruins of an ancient cairn—a small, circular monument. A tree has grown up through its center and its roots entwine some of the stones. Selection of this gull and the bears for portrayal at Devil’s Lake represented high spiritual significance for the creators, since the effigies themselves form an interdependent relationship with the natural environment. While the terraglyphs may be seen year-round, they have their own high holy days, when the mounds exhibit magical qualities not visible at any other time.

A case in point is the gull earthwork. While discernable from ground level, it may be far better appreciated in its entirety only from a high vantage point. Such a perspective may be obtained at a ledge jutting out of the cliff face toward the effigy, 200 feet on, and reached with no great effort by following the marked trail. From this natural precipice, the gull should appear in all its landscaped symmetry. But it is invisible, save only once annually, at dusk of the vernal equinox. As the sun goes down on the first day of spring, and for a few days thereafter, the colos­sal bird far below begins to gradually materialize until it seems to be streaking toward the lake. A truly dramatic spectacle results when direct rays of twilight delineate the terraglyph with shadows, lengthening and spreading with the gathering evening.

The designers of this earthwork deliberately and precisely oriented it to achieve this wonderful vision, which, like the special effect of some cosmic mechanism, has been faithfully reproducing itself for over the last 2,000 years or more. At ground level, the shadows cast by the gull seem meaningless. But when observed from the cliff high above, the effigy comes to life. A similar drama occurred on the opposite side of the lake, as bear mounds were similarly outlined by the Sunrise of the shortest day of the year. Their alignment with the solstice signified the beginning of winter, the season during which bears hibernate. So, too, the coastal gull mound oriented to sundown of the vernal equinox marks the advent of spring, when birds do indeed return to Spirit Lake.

Certainly, the ancient residents did not go to such lengths of observation and precision for frivolous purposes. Indeed, a purely economic intention for the effigies as agricultural calendar markers seems unlikely. Rather, it is clear they were landscaped as cultic deus ex machina—outsized theatrical devices to inspire a whole community’s sense of awe in the cosmic cycle, and to make them personally experience its eternal rhythm.

Eighty miles southwest of Devil’s Lake, just across the Mississippi River from Prairie du Chien in neighboring Iowa, identically configured bear mounds may be found in an entirely different setting. Effigy Mounds National Monument enfolds 1,475 acres threaded by 11 miles of woodland trails. Its 200 earthworks—the largest surviving collection of its kind in all the Americas—are uniformly three to three-and-a-half feet high. They include representations of lynx, birds and bears averaging 90 feet in length. An outstanding exception is the 137-foot Great Bear Mound. Even more prodigious is a compound or segmented earthwork resembling a thick, straight line, the largest specimen on our continent at 470 feet in length.

But the most significant group of bioglyphs belongs to the so-called “Marching Bears.” They run in an arc of 10 bruins apparently led by an eagle at their head and shepherded by another bringing up the rear, followed by abstract, linear mounds. Contrary to most ancient American mounds, some of the Iowa examples were used for human burials. Those bear effigies which are tombs feature the deceased interred at the animal’s head, with copper and flint ritual grave goods installed at the haunches for purposes as arcane as they are unknown. Ceremonial fires were ignited in the heart area. Most, but not all of the bears point to the south, while the bird mounds fly toward the southeast.

South is still the traditional “Direction of Becoming” revered throughout many Native American tribal cultures, and the southeast was identified with the Feathered Serpent, the fair-haired man-god who arrived over the Atlantic Ocean as the survivor of a natural catastrophe that destroyed his island empire. He and his southeasterly direction are likewise associated with the rising of the planet Venus, his astral avatar for rebirth. So, too, the bear was a powerful symbol of regeneration. The animal’s winter-long hibernation is a death-like sleep, from which it awakes in the spring to a renewal of life. The creature’s rebirth implications, combined with Iowa’s effigies largely oriented to the southern direction of becoming, suggest the mounds belonged to a mystery cult with emphasis on an afterlife.

Such an interpretation is underscored by the bird figures which appear to lead the bears. They are positioned southeasterly toward the rise of Venus. Birds are, moreover, a universal human archetype for the soul found around the world and throughout human cultures from dynastic Egypt to Iowa’s earth effigies. Together, the bird and bear images imply the rebirth of both the gross body and the ephemeral spirit after death, illuminating the significance of their interred grave goods. The tools, weapons, and copper artifacts are symbols of physical existence appropriately buried in that most physical extension of the bear, its limb. The corpse was laid in the geoglyph’s head to correspond with the notion that the skull is the vessel of consciousness, while the ritual fire burnt in the figure’s heart signified the Phoenix flame of the soul’s eternal energy.

These metaphysical concepts underlie another, inextricably related level of meaning. Some observers believe the ancient effigies are representations of star clusters in the night sky. The Algonquian tribes, for example, referred to a particular constellation as “the Great Bear.” They recounted that it was pursued by birds, just as the Iowa bird mounds are in close proximity to the avian bioglyphs. These structures undoubtedly reflect the Algonquian myth: the largest specimen at Effigy Mounds National Monument is known as “the Great Bear.” It lies near the “Little Bear” terraglyph, suggesting Western Man’s own view of the heavens in Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, the Big Bear and Little Bear constellations.

Nor is the parallel only so much cultural coincidence, simply an apparently modern European influence impacting an indigenous culture. As Shepherd and Sanders write, “When the first whites came to North America, they found that the Algonquian tribes already identified the same stars as the Great Bear that they themselves did. In time, they found that this was true from Nova Scotia westward to Point Barrow, and down the Pacific coast, and even among the Pueblos” (Paul Shepard and Barry Sanders, The Sacred Paw: The Bear in Nature, Myth, and Literature, NY: Penguin Group/Arkana, 1992). It is far easier to accept pre-Columbian visits from ancient Old World seafarers, part of whose imparted astro­nomical knowledge was passed down through successive generations of tribal North Americans, than to conclude that both prehistoric Europeans and paleo-Indians independent of each other just happened to apply the same names to the same group of stars.

But these obvious connections represent only the archaeological significance of the Upper Midwest’s landscaped artwork, infused as it was with spiritual imagery meant to put human beings in accord with the metaphysical underpinnings of life. That their designers succeeded in such a high purpose is self-evident in the pitifully few, numinous effigy mounds which still exist. Long after the disappearance of their creators, they con­tinue to function as originally intended.

Is there anything we make today that will similarly endure 2,000 years from now?

Southern India was also much more vast and incorporated Sri Lanka, which is now an island. Together they comprised the kingdom of Kumari Kandam, “the Land of the Virgin”—an interesting correspondence to the name given to ancient Egypt, Ta-Mery, “the place of Mary.” As with Heliopolis and Tiwanaku, Kumari Kandam is described in the Tamil texts as a high civilization, part of a “Golden Age,” where the pursuit of knowledge was held in the highest esteem; and cities of knowledge were created by men of great stature, both physically and mentally, who possessed exquisite skills in temple building and sacred knowledge that compared them to gods.

Tamil traditions describe this age as a time when “kingship was lowered from heaven” at the sacred hill of Arunachala, whereupon it became a repository of a creator god’s power and knowledge.

Arunachala lies in the land of the Dravidian culture, which is at least 10,000 years old, and the origin of today’s Tamil culture. The hill is mentioned in the oldest Tamil sacred literature, the Tolkappiyam, which itself refers to an even older work that was based on a library of archaic texts said to have been compiled more than 10,000 years earlier. We are therefore talking about an extremely old scripture spanning unimaginable eons of time, much like the oral traditions of the Aborigines.

The theme is repeated in Central America. Of all the interesting things about the Mayan corpus named Popul Vuh, two items in particular stand out. First, its depiction of life during a “Golden Age” before a catastrophic global flood swept the earth sounds remarkably like most gnostic texts compiled by other civilizations with whom the Maya supposedly had never interacted. Second, it describes how the “First Men” possessed clairvoyant ability: “Endowed with intelligence, they saw and instantly they could see far; they succeeded in seeing; they succeeded in knowing all that there is in the world. The things hidden in the distance they saw without first having to move… they were formidable men.”

The Flood and the End of the Golden Age

Certainly makes one yearn for those times, but all good things come to an end. The Tamil Puranas state that there came a great pouring of the waters that submerged vast tracts of land, including the ancient academies, beneath gigantic waves. In fact there are at least 12 identical worldwide legends of great lands swallowed by rapidly encroaching oceans, and with them, the folding of the “golden age” of the gods.

Such written accounts are hardly the product of a fertile imagination. Off the coast of India there have been found no less than five sites of pre-diluvial cities, such as the former Mahabalipuram (“The city of the giant Bali”), along with the Temple of the Seven Pagodas whose golden tips are seen by fishermen during a calm sea. On the northwestern coast of India, out across the bay from the present city of Dwarka, lies the original city of Kushasthali and its temple presided by Khrishna, now submerged beneath 50 feet of murky ocean.

To the southwest of India lie submerged staircases in what are now the Maldive Islands, while in the Micronesian island of Pohnpei (“upon a stone altar”), 100 artificial islands comprise the pentagonal temple of Nan Madol (“reef of heaven”). Within it sits the basalt temple of Nan Dowas and its central pyramid, wherein megalithic foundation stones are said to have been erected by two antediluvian gods who came by boat from a sinking land to the west, and “by their magic spells, one by one, the great masses of stone flew through the air like birds, settling down into their appointed place.” Traditionally called Sounhleng, “reef of heaven,” it’s built as a mirror image of its sunken counterpart Kahnimweiso Namkhet (“city of the Horizon”). Indeed, undersea ruins of two cities have been discovered here, lying at great depths and complete with standing columns on pedestals rising to 24 feet.

Off the Japanese island of Yonaguni lies an entire citadel complete with deliberately cut and purposefully angled platforms and columns. It, too, now lies beneath 100 feet of ocean water following a catastrophic rise in sea level.

So, what does science have to say about this event so unanimously experienced around the world?

There are 175 global flood myths sharing near-identical descriptions, and mostly in cultures that allegedly had no contact with one another. Professor of Geology, Alexander Tollman, compared several flood myths in which the Earth was described as hit by “seven burning suns” before being overwhelmed by floods. He compared these with geological anomalies of molten rock thrown up by impact sites and proved that around 10,000 BC the Earth was indeed hit by seven comet fragments whose impact generated an increase in radioactive Carbon-14, which has been found in fossilized trees dating to that period.

Another impressive study into terrestrial comet impacts concluded that “the environmental data in the flood myths fit remarkably well with the modeling for a large, oceanic comet impact, above the threshold for global catastrophe at or greater than 100 gigatons.” The geologic and atmospheric report of the impacts pretty much synchronizes with the description of conditions in myths: six or seven days of intense rain and hurricane-force winds, generated and sustained by the air pressure blast wave and the impact plume, not to mention the thick, muddy rain filled with submicron debris generated by the impact itself. The Maya described it as “heavy resin fell from the sky… a black rain began to fall by day and by night.” There is certainly evidence that both animal and human survivors found shelter on tops of mountains as high as 1,430 feet, only to be overwhelmed by advancing water. On the peaks of mountains in France lie the splintered bones of humans violently mixed with that of mammoth, reindeer, carnivores, and birds that became extinct shortly thereafter. Whale skeletons and Ice Age marine life can even be found 600 feet above sea level—inland in Vermont!

If a comet, or fragments of one, collided with the earth and generated this kind of unparalleled destruction, the soot and particle debris from the event—which according to world legends seems to have blanketed the entire globe—would be sealed in the geologic record as sediment in ice. In 2008 a team of Danish geologists conducting an extensive examination of ice cores in Greenland secured the precise date of the event to 9703 BC. Startled by the layer of soot in the ice, they remarked that “the climate shift was so sudden that it is as if a button was pressed.”

The Tall Ones

Various traditions state that “the knowledge” and other important records of “men of high learning” not only survived the flood but were promulgated by groups of adepts, the most notable being the Seven Sages, and the Akhu Shemsu Hor, “the shining ones, followers of Horus.” In the Edfu Texts they were the only divine beings who knew how temples and sacred places are to be created.

The Tamil Puranas also mention how seven sages visited the sacred hill of Arunachala after the flood to collect ‘the knowledge’ and embark on reconstructing the area between the Indus and the Ganges, creating new temples and sowing the seeds of civilization. Likewise, Andean traditions describe the megalithic monument builders as the Huari, a race of unusually tall, white-skinned, bearded giants, the most celebrated of which was a builder god named Viracocha. Together with seven “shining ones,” he set about rebuilding the temple complex of Tiwanaku, from whence they set out to promulgate the knowledge throughout the Andes.

The same story is repeated over and over by cultures seemingly disconnected from one another. And it is due to their efforts that we have inherited this legacy of temples and places of veneration.

The initiates at the temple of Edfu were instructed to “stand up with the Ahau” who measured nine cubits tall. There is evidence that such beings not only existed but their descendents survived well into historic times. In the Pacific Ocean, the first European explorer to reach the island of Te Pito o Te Henua (“Navel of the World”) was Jacob Roggeveen, who did so on Easter Sunday, 1722, hence it’s recent, anglicized name of Easter Island. He faithfully recorded the experience along with some of the islanders’ traditions; one of them states that the population consisted of two types of races—the Short Ears and the Long Ears.

The Short Ears referred to the typical homo sapiens. As for the Long Ears, Roggeveen and his crew had direct interaction with them: “In truth, I might say that these savages are as tall and broad in proportion, averaging 12 feet in height. Surprising as it may appear, the tallest men on board our ship could pass between the legs of these children of Goliath without bending their head.”

Are we dealing here with the same Ahau associated with ancient Egypt? Possibly. Like so many other lands and their flood myths, Easter Island is said to have been part of a larger landmass before a giant cataclysm and a subsequent rise in sea level claimed much of it. Ocean maps validate this to be the case: what is now Easter Island was once a longer ridge of mountain ranges. The natives apparently received survivors from the drowned land of Hiva, and seven sages, “all illuminated men,” carefully surveyed the island before setting up sacred mounds at specific locations. Here we find several linguistic associations with Egypt and its builder gods, the Ahau, for the sacred platform constructed at the original landing place is called ahu, upon which seven moai were subsequently erected in commemoration of the original seven extraordinary builder gods.

There is also the word akh, “everlasting spirit”, not a far cry from the Egyptian ankh, meaning “everlasting life.”

The magician-builder gods of Easter Island were called Ma’ori-Ko-Hau-Rongorongo, “master of special knowledge,” and they are claimed to be the ancestors of the Long Ears. According to oral tradition they moved the moai with the use of mana, a kind of psychic force where matter yields to the focused intent of a person skilled in the subtle arts. Legend states that by “words of their mouths” the enigmatic stone heads were commanded to walk through the air.

There is an echo of this in Central America. Just as the Popul Vuh represents the oral history of the Quiche Maya, so the Codex Vaticanus records faithfully the very ancient oral traditions of Central America. In one curious passage it states that “in the First Age, giants existed in that country [Mexico]. They relate to one of the seven whom they mention as “having escaped from the deluge… he went to Cholula and there began to build a tower… in order that should a deluge come again he might escape to it.” Indeed the pyramid of Cholula still stands, partly because a newer, Spanish church now resides on top of it, and mostly because it’s the largest pyramid ever constructed in the world—its volume is greater than that of the great pyramid at Giza. In Nahuatl language it’s named Tlachihualtepetl, also known as the “artificial mountain.” Originally it was named Acholollan, meaning “water that falls in the place of flight.”

Certainly these builders were physically and intellectually endowed, as one account after another credits these unusual individuals with achieving the seemingly impossible, using techniques that bend the presently-known laws of physics. At the temple complex of Uxmal, the Pyramid of the Magician is said to have been raised in just one night by a man of magical disposition who “whistled and heavy rocks would move into place.” Compare this with the traditions of Tiwanaku, in which “the great stones were moved from their quarries of their own accord at the sound of a trumpet… taking up their positions on the site.” Similar attributes are common to the creators of Teotihuacan and Stonehenge, as well as the original Egyptian temples, which are described as “speedy at construction.”

Such legends are consistent with the use of mana by the magician builders of Easter Island.

The Purpose of the Temple

The primary purpose behind the temple and the builder gods who restarted this legacy was to go on promulgating the knowledge over an enormous span of ages, by which I mean 4,000 years at a stretch. This is an incalculable reach of time by modern standards, particularly as we in this computer age can barely cope with planning a quarter of the year at a time; even a week in the world of e-mail seems like a century. Physical evidence of the multiple layers of structures beneath present temple buildings suggests the original sites were maintained, improved, and expanded over the course of thousands of years. Ancient Egyptian traditions assert beyond their 3,000-year recorded history that no site was considered sacred unless it had been built upon the foundations of earlier temples, particularly those connected with Zep Tepi.

A temple built during the historic period and superimposed on the foundation of another was determined by a pre-existing entity set in the time of myth, so that this new structure became a concretization of its ancestral predecessor, or as the Pyramid Texts inform us, “…made like unto that which was made in its plans of the beginning.” Thus, the foundation mound of the Great Pyramid at Giza dates to 10,500 BC, but the additional final courses of outer casing stones over the inner core of the building features shafts that reference specific stars in 2,500 BC.

Aside from the visual impact of the sight of Tiwanaku on the eyes of Spaniard Pedro Cieza de Léon in 1549, it’s not unusual that such places should still exert a tremendous influence on the pilgrim like a master hypnotist’s pass of the hand. The art of creating temples was serious business involving the synthesizing of universal laws and the harnessing of natural forces to create spaces where the veil between worlds is thinner.

As a testament to the skill of the builder gods, their practical magic is still palpable across the face of the earth; their creations remain sentient, living and breathing, like organisms. Their structures are mirrors of the universe. When we stare at them, we see our own image reflected back in stone. The experience is commonly shared from generation to generation. This may not seem so far-fetched because the locations chosen by the builder-gods for their “cities of knowledge” are places where planetary electromagnetics behave differently. And being electromagnetic by nature we pick up on these subtleties.

The Edfu Pyramid Texts—as well as inscriptions at Teotihuacan and instructions in the sacred texts of the Tamil—describe how the temples were to be designed as places where the individual could be “transformed into a god, into a shining star.” In other words, the purpose of these mansions of the gods was nothing less than the transfiguration of the human soul, through which it was believed the individual achieved complete self-empowerment. Their craftsmen wished to remind us of this someday, lest we forgot. Thus when they built temples, they also created myths and rituals to preserve the knowledge, so as to survive whatever cataclysm the Earth cared to brew.

The Gnostic Gospels unearthed in 1947 at Nag Hammadi, near the temple of Dendera, offer a graphic reminder of this aim and why the tradition was maintained from age to age. The papyri state that temples were built “as a representation of the spiritual places,” and in doing so, created an antidote against forces of darkness that “…steered the people who followed them into great troubles, by leading them astray with many deceptions. They died not having found the truth and without knowing the God of truth. And thus the whole creation became enslaved forever from the foundations of the world.”

© 2010, 2011 Freddy Silva. Adapted from the new book, Common Wealth: The Origin of Sacred Sites and The Rebirth of Ancient Wisdom, by Freddy Silva. Available direct from the author’s website www.invisibletemple.com.

Browning was a tough-minded, near-Agnostic Christian deeply interested in science, who held in contempt many aspects of mysticism and all aspects of “psychic” phenomena. He was especially scornful of mediumship, or “channeling,” and for a particular reason. The poet, whose hearty optimism masked a deep despair at man’s capacity for evil, had several encounters with Daniel Dunglas Home (1833-1886), the most celebrated medium of his day and a man whose uncanny, seemingly supernatural skills always provoked a strong reaction. Browning took away from those encounters a profound skepticism of all things spiritualist and a violent hatred of Home. This latter spurred him to write a 2,000-line poem, “Mr. Sludge, ‘the Medium’” (1864), which constitutes a crushing indictment of all aspects of mediumship and is a portrait of a D.D. Home-like medium who is no better than a psychopath and fraud.

Love and sex lurked in the background to add fuel to the fire of Browning’s animosity toward Home. On July 23, 1855, the poet attended, at the house of Mr. and Mrs. J.S. Rymer, of Ealing, England, a séance presided over by the tall, pale, consumptive-looking medium. At Brown­ing’s side was his wife, the almost equally famous English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), who is best known today for her Son­nets from the Portuguese. Elizabeth was initially enchanted by this séance and became, for a while, a believer and near-acolyte of Home. Robert was furious, not only at what he saw as an insult to his intelligence, but because he believed Home was using these trumped-up displays of paranormal power to flirt with his wife and perhaps seduce her.

The details of the courtship and marriage of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning are well-known and were famously depicted in the 1934 film The Barretts of Wimpole Street starring Norma Shearer. It was only with the success of his long series of poems, Bells and Pomegranates (1841-1845), that Robert finally made his name as a poet. Elizabeth Barrett, better known at the time, read Bells and Pomegranates and inserted glowing praise for Browning’s poetry in an upcoming volume of poetry of her own. Robert read the praise, wrote Elizabeth to thank her for the compliment and declare that he had fallen in love with her poetry—and with the poetess! He asked to come round and see her.

This wasn’t easy to arrange. Elizabeth had been a semi-invalid from an early age, suffering from the early stages of tuberculosis. Now she was 39. The hothouse-like confinement of her early years had perhaps helped her gifts to mature early. She was to write: “At four I first mounted Pegasus [began writing poetry].” Between the ages of seven and eight she read the history of England, Rome, and Greece “and began poetry in earnest”—Scott, Pope’s Iliad, Shakespeare. “At eleven I wished to be considered an authoress—novels were thrown aside, poetry and essays were my studies.” Her father privately printed her first major poem, The Battle of Marathon, in 1820, when she was 14. By the time Robert contacted her, she was, along with Alfred Lord Tennyson, the most famous English poet of her day.

By now, though, Elizabeth Barrett was virtually a prisoner in the Barrett household on Wimpole Street in London, not only because of her poor health but because of the tyranny of her father. Mr. Barrett, who had been a widower for 10 years, forbade all 11 of his children, including not only his beloved, frail, brilliant eldest daughter Elizabeth but also all of his sons, to ever marry. It was only with great difficulty, and surreptitiously, that Robert could get to see Elizabeth. A torrid romance, in exquisite prose, was carried on by letter. In 1846 Robert and Elizabeth eloped, first to Paris then on to Italy, without telling Mr. Barrett. (He disinherited his daughter immediately upon hearing the news.) The happily married couple lived in Italy almost continuously for the next 16 years until Elizabeth’s death in 1861 at the age of 55. All this time her father never saw or communicated with Elizabeth in any way.

One of Robert Browning’s poems famously begins, “Oh, to be in England/ Now that April’s there.” It was on July 12, 1855, that the Brownings touched the soil of Britain on a first, rare, visit. July 23 found them sitting across from the gaunt, red-haired, shyly-smiling figure of D.D. Home at a heavy, seemingly normal, table that, in a few moments, would shudder and tilt uncannily sideways. Elizabeth must have awaited the beginning of the séance with trepidation. Years earlier, she’d written that she shrank from the “temptations” of spiritualism as from a “stew of infant children,” and that she regarded communicating with the dead as only—possibly—an adjunct to certain biblical texts. She wrote, “We read of a prophecy concerning ‘angels ascending and descending upon the son of man.’ What if this spiritual influx and afflux were beginning? It seems to me possible—but we have to wait quietly and see.”

D.D. Home’s huge fame, preceding the séance attended by the Brownings, may well have predisposed Elizabeth a little bit toward the medium. Born in Scotland, reared by an aunt in the U.S., Daniel Dunglas Home returned to Great Britain at age 22 to quickly garner excited admiration as someone through whose agency spirits spoke, tables moved mysteriously, hands materialized and dematerialized. Witnesses claimed Home could elongate his body at will; some said they had seen him float up to the ceiling; sounds issued from his personal accordion when there was no visible sign of a player. Home’s greatest feat lay in floating out through the closed window of a London building, hovering 35 (some said 85) feet above the street, and re-entering through another closed window. Sir William Crookes, discoverer of the element thallium, inventor of the radiometer, and a pioneer in the study of electrical discharge in a vacuum, wrote of the medium’s capabilities: “I have heard from the lips of three witnesses to the most striking occurrences of this kind . . . To reject the recorded evidence on this subject is to reject all testimony whatever, for no fact in sacred or profane history is supported by a stronger array of proofs.”

The séance in the Rymer household at Ealing was every bit as incendiary as Elizabeth and Robert had been led to expect. They both shivered as the table moved; the two sat rigidly as they were touched by invisible as well as visible, “ectoplasmic,” hands. Elizabeth would later write in a letter to her sister, Henrietta, that, “At the request of the medium, the spiritual hand took from the table a garland [of clematis] which lay there and placed it upon my head. The particular hand that did this was of the largest human size, as white as snow, and very beautiful.  It was as near to me as this hand I write with, and I saw it distinctly.” Elizabeth asserted that she was “not troubled in any way” by these happenings, even putting on her eyeglasses to see the hands when they were farther away (thus, she wrote, “proving that it was not a mere mental impression”). It seemed to her that the hands were coming out from under the table, though she reported the opinion of another participant that they rose from out of the wood of the table. A spirit hand finally elongated itself to a height of two yards above the table and then floated out the window.

The séance infuriated Robert, who saw outrageous sexual innuendo in the placing of the garland on Elizabeth’s head; this was, he concluded, simply a conjurer’s trick. As Martin Ebon writes, “with Home on the scene, an exploitative, pseudo-erotic element” entered into the séance. Still, Robert, giving an account of the sêance not long afterward to Elizabeth Kinney, an American friend, expressed bafflement at just how all these things could have been done. He had seen a heavy lamp moving all alone on the table and admitted, “I don’t know how it was done.” He saw Elizabeth’s dress “slightly but distinctly uplifted in a manner I cannot account for—as if by some object inside.” He could not fathom just how a hand “appeared from the edge of the table opposite to my wife and myself; was withdrawn, reappeared and moved about, rose and sank—it was clothed in loose white folds, like muslin, down to the table’s edge—from which it was never separated—then another hand, larger, appeared, pushed a wreath, or pulled it, off the table, picked it from the ground, brought it to my wife . . . and put it on her head.”

In a letter written to a friend sometime later, Browning angrily dismissed this “whole display of ‘hands,’ ‘spirit-utterances,’ etc.” as “a cheat and imposture.” He could not keep himself from bursting out in personal invective against Home, declaring that the medium was “acting like a child around the Rymers, affecting the manners, endearments and other peculiarities of a very little child indeed,” addressing his hosts as “Papa and Mama,” and “kissing the family abundantly.”

A few days after the séance, when Home and Rymer called on the Brownings, Robert pointed in a rage to the way out and told Home, “If you’re not out of that door in half a minute, I’ll fling you down the stairs.” Before the medium left, Elizabeth (according to Home) placed both her hands in his and said in a voice filled with emotion, “Oh, dear Mr. Home, do not, do not blame me. I am so sorry but I am not to blame.”  Robert responded by calling Home “a dungball” to his face.

Years later, Home, responding in his autobiography to the vicious accusations seemingly leveled against him by Browning in Mr. Sludge, ‘the Medium,’ claimed the poet had reacted to the séance in the way he did because he was jealous that the disembodied hands were placing the garland on Elizabeth’s head and not his own.

The paths of Home and the Brownings were to cross, or almost cross, in France and in Italy just a few more times over the coming years. Each time, Robert unceremoniously shooed Home away and loudly lectured Elizabeth on the perfidious and fraudulent nature of mediums and the claims they made to be in touch with the spirit world. He was never quite able to convince Elizabeth. A few years later, she wrote to Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and a quiet believer in the occasional positive achievements of mediumship, that, “I don’t know how people can keep up their prejudice against spiritualism with tears in their eyes, how they are not at least thrown on the wish that it might be true . . . My tendency is to break up against it like a crying child.” Elizabeth felt that there was a need for a serious appreciation of spiritualism so that channeling could at least be kept from “the desecration of charlatans and fanatics.”

Martin Ebon writes that at bottom Browning regarded channeling as the expression of a power the poet had always feared (and wrote about in his poem on mesmerism, which is a vehement denunciation of the phenomenon), namely, “the power of one human being to envelope and dominate other souls, in ways beyond man’s comprehension. The poet saw the human soul as belonging to God, not to man.” Ebon concludes: “Browning’s dislike for mediums, aside from [their] actual cheating, was a feeling of reverence for the integrity of the human soul.”

The briefest glance at any part of Browning’s poem Mr. Sludge, ‘the Medium’ shows us how strangely obscure and jarringly vitriolic this odd poem is. The poem seems to be a confession by Sludge that mediumship, in his practice of it, is fawning, deceitful, and almost psychopathic in its heartless manipulation of a mankind desperately in search of succor. G. K. Chesterton suggests this may not be the whole story. The English critic tells us that there was nothing Robert Browning loved more than “the utterance of large and noble truths by the lips of mean and grotesque human beings.” Chesterton agrees that the entire poem as narrated by Sludge consists in the medium’s confessing to every last  one of all the terrible and dishonest things that he has done in the name of the corrupt art of mediumship. But Chesterton believes that what Sludge has been indulging in is really a gigantic winnowing-out of the wheat from the chaff. For, at the very end of the poem, after having thrown out so much, Sludge is, it seems, left with a few grains that suggest there may be something to channeling after all. Chesterton points, summarizing Sludge’s words:

“And then, when the last of his loathsome secrets has been told, when he has nothing left either to gain or to conceal, then he rises up into a perfect bankrupt sublimity and makes the great avowal which is the whole pivot and meaning of the poem. He says in effect: ‘Now that my interest in deceit is utterly gone, now that I have admitted, to my own final infamy, the frauds that I have practiced, now that I stand before you in a patent and open villainy which has something of the disinterestedness and independence of the innocent, now I tell you with the full and impartial authority of a lost soul that I believe that there is something in spiritualism. The avowal itself is not only expressed clearly, but prepared and delivered with admirable rhetorical force:”

‘Now for it, then! Will you believe me, though?

You’ve heard what I confess: I don’t unsay

A single word: I cheated when I could,

Rapped with my toe-joints, set sham hands at work,

Wrote down names weak in sympathetic ink.

Rubbed odic lights with ends of phosphor-match,

And all the rest; believe that: believe this,

By the same token, though it seem to set

The crooked straight again, unsay the said,

Stick up what I’ve knocked down; I can’t help that,

It’s truth! I somehow vomit truth to-day.

This trade of mine—I don’t know, can’t be sure

But there was something in it, tricks and all!’ “It is strange,” Chesterton concludes enigmatically, “to call a poem with so clear and fine a climax an attack on spiritualism.”

A storm of controversy swirls around this subject. The recent excitement began with a science news story that went viral on the Internet, announcing that scientists J. J. Matese and Daniel Whitmire had found a “Jovian mass companion” to our Sun in the outer Solar System. If proved, the scenario is breathtaking and would be the biggest news in astronomy since Copernicus informed us that Earth orbits the Sun. What would this discovery mean to our notion of the Solar System, and what might the impact be to astrology?

Actually, the idea is not new. As far back as the discovery of Neptune (1846), astronomers have suspected that “something” was affecting the orbits of the outer planets. Although some believe those anomalies were the result of inaccurate measurements at the time, modern astronomers have noticed that comets entering the inner Solar System seem to have been mysteriously kicked out of their orbits and sent hurtling toward the Sun.

Astronomers first postulated the hypothesis for this still-theoretical object in 1987 to account for cycles of mass extinctions that appear in the geological record. In 1984 paleontologists David Raup and Jack Sepkoski examined 250 million years of fossil records and observed that massive species extinction occurred at 65-million-year intervals. They could not identify a cause, although it was speculated that the reason was not terrestrial. Two independent teams of astronomers, Davis, Hut and Muller, and Whitmire and Jackson, examined the data and suggested that the Sun had an as yet undetected companion star in a highly elliptical orbit.

The Kuiper Belt, where Pluto orbits, is a band of rocky debris outside the orbit of Neptune. At the far reaches of the Solar System is a sphere of rocky material known as the Oort Cloud that extends to the boundary of the Sun’s gravitational field. Long-period comets are thought to originate there. Astronomers believe that the object in question periodically disturbs the orbits of comets in the Oort cloud, deflecting them inward toward the Sun, causing enormous devastation if they impact Earth. This theory became known as the Nemesis, or Death Star, hypothesis. Nemesis is a Greek goddess whose name means “due enactment,” or “to give what is due.” She was seen as the sinister and inescapable agent of divine retribution, punishing people for misdeeds.

The Nemesis theory fulfills all the requirements prescribed by the Raup and Sepkoski mass extinction timetable. Astrophysicist Richard A. Muller believes that Nemesis is a Red Dwarf, a relatively small and “cool” low-mass star. It’s believed that Red Dwarfs are the most plentiful stars, accounting for roughly 75% of all the stars in the Milky Way. Muller imagines that Nemesis would be less than a third the size of the Sun, of magnitude 7 – 12, and only 1/1000 as bright. As envisioned by Muller, Davis, and Hut, Nemesis might travel in an elliptical orbit that at its perihelion (closest point) brings it within a half light year of the Sun (one light year is about six trillion miles) and into the midst of the Oort Cloud. The Sun’s closest known neighbor, Proxima Centauri, is about 4.25 light years distant.

He thinks Nemesis might be right under our noses, visible with a pair of binoculars, if we just knew where to look. “We see no reason to assume the star is invisible,” says Muller, “since most of the stars in the sky have never had their distance from us measured.” Based on a theoretical orbit derived from original apogees of a number of atypical long period comets that describe an orbital arc meeting the specifications of his theory, Muller believes Nemesis will be found in the southern constellation of Hydra, the Water Serpent. The ultimate evidence would of course be finding the Nemesis star, and the WISE telescope (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) will provide an infrared atlas to the whole sky. The data has already been collected and a full report is expected by February of 2012.

Another group of scientists, led by Daniel Whitmire, an astrophysicist with the University of Southwestern Louisiana, and Al Jackson, of the Computer Science Corporation, announced their own theory of a companion star to the Sun in the same 1987 issue of Nature as the article by Muller and his colleagues. Although the means of triggering massive extinctions are essentially the same, Whitmire’s group believed that the companion star is invisible: either a brown dwarf, or even a black hole.

Choosing the opposite mythical identity, Whitmire’s team dubbed the object Tyche, goddess of fortune, and the good sister of Nemesis. A brown dwarf is a “failed star” that did not attract enough matter to cause compression that would cause the hydrogen atoms at the core to fuse and ignite. Brown dwarfs cool and fade with time, finally emitting only infrared wavelengths. Currently, Whitmire and J. J. Matese are working at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and published the recent sensational report. They believe Tyche is a gas giant roughly four times as massive as Jupiter (not bigger). Whitmire has said that Tyche will probably have colorful spots and cloud bands like Jupiter and will likely have moons.

Scientists estimate that more than 60% of stars have one or more companions that orbit each other, so statistically it wouldn’t be a surprise to discover that our Sun is a binary. It’s even likely. At times both stars are massive enough to achieve fusion and circle each other around a point called the barycenter. At other times, one star achieves enough mass to catch fire. In the case of a brown dwarf companion, the smaller body radiates heat and emits a dim glow. According to the theory of barycenters, there is a relationship between the unexpected quiet period of sunspots at a time that is expected to be violent that would be explained by the presence of a massive body in the Solar System preventing solar disruptions because of magnetic ion emissions from the companion star.

More compelling evidence comes from Mike Brown, head of the team at Caltech who discovered dwarf planet Sedna along with Eris, Haumea, Makemake, and Quaor. Sedna has an extra-long and unusual elliptical orbit and is one of the most distant objects yet observed, with an orbit ranging between 76 and 975 AU (1 AU is the distance between the Earth and the Sun). Sedna’s orbit is estimated to take 10,500-12,000 years.

Brown commented in a Discover magazine article, “Sedna shouldn’t be there. It never comes close enough to be affected by the Sun, but it never goes far enough away from the Sun to be affected by other stars.” He suggested that a massive unseen object is responsible for Sedna’s mystifying orbit, and that its gravity keeps Sedna in its far-distant portion of space. Brown further speculated, “Out to about 1,000 AU where Sedna lives, there could be ten or twenty Pluto-sized objects, and a handful of larger things, too. Some of these suspected worlds could be as big as Mercury, or even Mars.”

Additional support for a binary companion comes from an unexpected quarter. The Hindu Vedas, the ancient wisdom of India, has revealed advanced knowledge that has informed and inspired some of the world’s greatest thinkers. The idea was popularized by Walter Cruttenden, founder of the Binary Research Institute, in his recent award-winning documentary, The Great Year. Hindu cosmology includes an explanation of the phenomenon of Precession of the Equinoxes, through a cycle of ages called Yugas, which are mirrored in the description of the Greek ages. The mechanism for this is a binary companion of the Sun whose periodic appearance ushers in a golden age, and whose disappearance plunges the world into unconsciousness. In this view, the closer our companion gets, the more light and wisdom increases, so the idea of a goddess who brings good fortune is an apt mythical connection. The Rishis, Hindu sages, taught that this cycle was about 24,000 years, closer to a cycle of Precession, so in this case we would expect the orbit of the star to be smaller than what the scientists now believe.

Ancient Indian astronomers went even further, giving a physical reason for how the dual star or binary motion might allow the rise and fall of human consciousness to occur. They said that as the Sun (with the Earth and other planets) traveled along its set orbital path with its companion star, it would cyclically move close to, then away from, a point in space referred to as Vishnunabhi, a supposed magnetic center or “grand center.” Perhaps this is a black hole? This idea is echoed in other philosophies that refer to a Great Central Sun.

Tyche, whose name means “luck,” in Greek, presided over providence, prosperity, and the destiny of a city. She was often depicted with a crown that looked like city walls. Holding a rudder, she was the divinity who guided world affairs, and in this respect, she was one of the Greek Fates. Depicted with a ball, she represented the caprice of fortune—unsteady and capable of rolling in any direction.  Shown with Ploutos, or the horn of Amalthea, she was the symbol of the plentiful gifts of fortune. Tyche stood on the “wheel of fortune,” which was the zodiac, or wheel of the year. She was Nemesis’s sister and was the positive side of the equation that balanced the dire dispensations of her sibling.

Is Nemesis or Tyche an ominous dark star, a specter of doom, lurking at the edge of the solar system and making its way toward us, trailing Armageddon in its wake? Or, is this mysterious body a goddess of good fortune, banishing darkness and evil, and bringing the return of a golden age of enlightenment?

The Greeks assigned the heavenly counterpart of Tyche to Virgo, the largest constellation in the sky after the southern constellation of Hydra, the Water Serpent, and Virgo and Hydra share a celestial border. It seems fitting that the largest object orbiting the Sun would be discovered here. If Tyche appears in Virgo by Celestial Longitude, she may ultimately and cyclically reveal the deeper significance of this sign, the “hidden light” taught in Alchemy, which must be awakened through spiritual practice.

Hinting at the same knowledge taught in the Vedas, there is another goddess connected with this part of the sky. Her name is Astraea. She was an ancient goddess of justice from a prior golden age who abandoned humanity when the world became too evil. She went to live among the stars, but her myth says she will return when people once again seek her wisdom.

Although the science is still theoretical, if Tyche’s existence is confirmed, I believe its astrological significance will be tied to its identity and nature. If it’s a Brown Dwarf, Tyche may act like a more expansive Jupiter, a goddess of wisdom and good fortune who brings increasing light and wisdom in a cyclical manner as the Vedas indicate. She might be a “failed star” but her periodic proximity to us nevertheless brings the gift of illumination. If Tyche proves to be a Black Hole, then she may act like a more intense version of Saturn’s energy, expressing more in the nature of Nemesis and bringing tough karmic lessons. And if our star’s companion is a Red Dwarf, then the influence will be like a smaller sun, contributing more intense light and lessons of the heart, as she cyclically reappears in an aeons long cycle.

In late August 2011 NASA released a tantalizing report that WISE’s highly sensitive infrared vision had detected 100 new Brown Dwarfs. In a provocative hint Michael Cushing, a WISE team member at JPL, said, “We may even find a Brown Dwarf closer to us than our closest known star.” At a time when the world as we know it seems to be coming apart at the seams, a goddess of good fortune would be welcome indeed.  Stay tuned.

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