Angkor Wat, Giza, Paracas and the World-Wide Grid

In their outstanding book Heaven's Mirror, Graham Hancock and Santha Faiia point out the undeniable fact that Angkor Wat is located seventy-two degrees east of Giza in Egypt (page 254).  

Seventy-two is an important precessional number.  It is highly unlikely that the site of Angkor Wat would be located such an important number of degrees of longitude from the site of the Great Pyramid at Giza simply by accident, especially because both the Great Pyramid and the art and architecture of Angkor Wat deliberately employ precessional numbers and symbology in their construction and (in the case of Angkor Wat) in their symbology, as Graham Hancock discusses in Heaven's Mirror and other books (including Fingerprints of the Gods).  

The fact that Angkor Wat bears a name which is made up of two sacred Egyptian words -- Ankh and Horus -- makes the connection between Giza and Angkor even more certain to be deliberate and not a coincidence.  Further, as Joseph P. Farrell and Scott D. de Hart discuss in their book Grid of the Gods, both sites contain pyramid structures; the pyramids at Angkor (shown above in an image from Wikimedia commons) happen to be shaped differently than the pyramids of Giza (being taller than they are wide, unlike those at Giza), but that may well be because their purpose is different, as Drs. Farrell and de Hart discuss in their book.

The fact that these two sites are separated by seventy-two degrees of longitude is an important piece of evidence supporting the assertion made by Drs. Farrell and de Hart, and by Graham Hancock and others, that the ancient astronomically-aligned sites on our planet are part of a global "grid" laid out by an ancient civilization or civilizations possessed of deep wisdom and sophisticated scientific understanding.  

Interestingly enough, Heaven's Mirror also reveals that one hundred eight degrees to the west of Giza lies another mysterious site: Paracas, on the Pacific coast of Peru.  One hundred eight is one of the most important and widely used precessional numbers in the mythology and traditions of the world.  It is, of course, 1.5 times 72.  Multiples of 108 which are found in numerous ancient myths and legends include 216, 432, and 540.  

Paracas is located in the Ica region of Peru, home to the mysterious elongated skulls which were recently in the news due to the results of DNA tests which are discussed in this article on the Ancient Origins website.  Paracas is also the home of an ancient geoglyph known as the "Paracas Candelabra" (shown below in an image from Wikimedia commons), which may reflect the constellation of the Southern Cross according to Graham Hancock's analysis in Heaven's Mirror. 

As Graham Hancock also points out in Fingerprints of the Gods, the ability to measure longitude accurately eluded "western civilization" until the 1700s, when John Harrison finally developed a chronometer accurate enough for precise longitudinal calculation (see discussion here regarding the "Longitude Prize").  The fact that Giza is seventy-two degrees west of Angkor Wat and one hundred eight degrees east of Paracas suggests that the ancients had a way of accurately measuring the globe.  

The fact of an ancient world-wide grid is not simply a piece of "gee-whiz" trivia.  As Drs. Farrell and de Hart discuss in the book linked above, such a grid may have been constructed in order to harness the enormous power of the earth, and potentially the power created by the motions of other planets in our solar system as well.  The fact that we today know little or nothing about such a grid -- and the fact that conventional academia reflexively suppresses such information and ridicules and marginalizes those who choose to investigate the evidence regarding this and other mysteries of mankind's ancient past -- suggests the possibility that vital information about our planet and our relationship to has been deliberately concealed for centuries.

Previous posts discussing the evidence for a world-wide grid can be found here, here, and here.

The importance of reading the Pyramid Texts (death and rebirth -- during life -- in ancient Egypt)

In the previous post, we saw that Jeremy Naydler's revolutionary thesis in his 2005 publication Shamanic Wisdom in the Pyramid Texts: The Mystical Tradition of Ancient Egypt asserts that much of the language interpreted by conventional Egyptology as describing the journey of the soul after death should actually be understood to describe the shamanic journey of the consciousness while still alive, undertaken during a deliberate ritual in which the participant symbolically died and experienced realities beyond the ordinary material realm.

That post discussed the fact that such a thesis completely upends the conventional paradigm, and also threatens the Darwinian "cult of progress" which undergirds so much of modern academia and has for the past century or more.  It also noted that the shamanic connections that Dr. Naydler finds in the ancient Pyramid Texts which he believes are describing this mystical initiatory experience correspond to assertions made by de Santillana and von Dechend in their seminal 1969 examination of the evidence that ancient mythology preserves and transmits advanced and sophisticated scientific and esoteric knowledge, entitled Hamlet's Mill: an essay on myth and the frame of time (for previous posts on Hamlet's Mill see here and here).

Dr. Naydler's book provides readers with a detailed tour of the texts in the Pyramid of Unas, who reigned from 2375 BC through 2345 BC, and whose pyramid not only contains the first and oldest known collection of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic texts inscribed on the inner walls of a pyramid, but also the best preserved corpus of texts.  As Dr. Naydler explains:

Of the nine pyramids at Saqqara, four are so badly damaged that whole sections of text are missing from certain walls.  These four are the pyramids of Teti, Pepi I, Merenre, and Iby.  The pyramids of the three queens of Pepi II are also not in the best state of preservation, and they suffer, along with that of Iby, from the added disadvantage of being single-chamber pyramids and therefore lacking an inscribed antechamber.  Their texts are thus not as representative as the other pyramids, which all have antechamber texts.  this leaves the greatest body of extant texts in the pyramid of Unas and the pyramid of Pepi II.  Pepi II's pyramid is the largest and has by far the most utterances on its walls.  But it has also sustained some damage, so the texts of this pyramid are incomplete.  One might think that this is more than made up for by the greater amount of texts.  The impression one gets, however, is that Pepi somewhat indiscriminately crammed as many texts as possible into his pyramid, often overriding earlier conventions as to the placement of utterances on walls oriented to one or another of the cardinal directions.

We are left, then, with the pyramid of Unas, which is not only the best preserved but also the one pyramid for which we have a complete set of utterances. 152-153.

Fortunately for those of us born at a time that enables us to see a tremendous amount of information via the web that was more difficult to find in previous decades and centuries, the entire corpus of texts from the pyramid of Unas is available online at  sites such as Vincent Brown's outstanding Pyramid Texts Online.  Here, visitors can read the utterances of the pyramid of Unas as they were intended to be read -- as a sort of "three-dimensional book" in which the location of various utterances is extremely significant (as Dr. Naydler explains: "Unlike a modern printed book that can be more or less read anywhere on the planet, the Pyramid Texts are wedded both to the chambers and to the walls on which they are inscribed.  A north-wall sarcophagus-chamber text could not be transposed to the east wall of the antechamber without losing a whole dimension of significance" [165]).

Visitors can see a diagram of the layout of the chambers in the interior of the pyramid, and click on the different walls of the chambers to read the utterances that are found in each area.  As one goes through the pyramid of Unas, the text of Dr. Naydler is an essential guide, and his book contains excellent 3-D representations of the chambers as well as diagrams of each wall showing the partitioning of various utterances and their locations on each wall.  However, the Pyramid Texts Online site is also an essential supplement to Dr. Naydler's book, as it allows readers to peruse every single utterance in its entirety.

Further, the online tour of the pyramid of Unas contains viewable photographic plates of each inscribed surface of the interior chambers, allowing visitors to see the hieroglyphs themselves in full color -- Dr. Naydler describes the first view the visitor to the actual temple has of the texts themselves: 

At the end of the corridor, the first chamber of the pyramid to be entered is the antechamber.  The antechamber is right at the center of the pyramid.  The exact center of the pyramid is the center point of the antechamber ceiling.  Here it is possible to stand up, and to have the experience of being encompassed on all sides by the blue-tinted hieroglyphs, which seem almost tangibly to emanate a magical power and to saturate the chamber with a mysterious potency. 160-161.

The Pyramid Texts Online site enables the viewer to see a glimpse of this magical blue color of these earliest extant human texts.  The hieroglyphs themselves are beautiful -- a writing system that is a masterpiece of design.  As John Anthony West explains in his groundbreaking 1979 work, Serpent in the Sky: The High Wisdom of Ancient Egypt :

The hieroglphyic system was complete at the time of the earliest dynasties of Egypt.  It continued in use for sacred and religious texts throughout the millennia of Egyptian history, and even beyond: the last recorded discovered hieroglyphs come from the island of Philae, just below the first Nile cataract, and date from the fourth century AD.  147.

Describing hieroglyphs carved into wood from the tomb of Hesire, vizier to the Third Dynasty pharaoh Zoser at Seqqara, he says: 

The hieroglyphs are already complete,and later Egypt will never succeed in carving them with more power or purity.  Still earlier hieroglyphs are no less complete, but in general less well executed.  nothing supports a postulated 'period of development.'  But it is possible that guardians of the ancient tradition required a number of generations in which to bring artists and artisans up to this standard.  14.

The beauty of the hieroglyphs in the Pyramid Texts of Unas is undeniable, and some measure of this beauty can be appreciated through the color photographic plates of the online site. 

Reading the texts of the pyramid of Unas online in their entirety helps one to grasp the power of Dr. Naydler's argument that these utterances describe a mystical experience undergone by the king during his life -- most likely during the very important Sed festival which was traditionally held during the thirtieth year of the reign of a pharaoh but which Dr. Naydler demonstrates could be held before that and could be held multiple times (it was not limited to once every thirty years).  For the celestial significance of the thirty-year cycle, see this previous post (among others).

For an example from the texts of the Unas pyramid which support the arguments of Dr. Naydler in his book, see utterances 223 and 224, from the east wall of the sarcophagus chamber.  Here, the king is urgently commanded to awake, to turn himself about, to stand up, and to "put on" the body again.  

Reading them in the Pyramid Texts Online site, the translations contain bracketed attempts to explain these commands in terms of speculation that they may refer to some kind of "courtyard circular procession (?)," because the conventional approach that these texts address the spirit of the dead king makes them somewhat confusing to the traditional translator.  

However, under Dr. Naydler's theory, they make perfect sense: the king (still very much alive) has undergone a profound and dangerous mystical experience in which his consciousness has taken leave of the body and journeyed into astral realms beyond the boundaries of ordinary human experience.  Now, the attendant priests are urgently requesting that he return, and again "clothe himself" with the body.

As Dr. Naydler writes on page 219 in discussion of these utterances:

Instructions to the soul to "put on" its body, or equally clothe itself, may have had a place in mummification rituals, but  in the present context they make considerably more sense if we assume that the king is not in a mummified state.  [. . .]  If the sequence of twelve utterances appears to end where it began, there may be a very good reason for this.  And that could be because the "return" at the end of the series of mystical and ritual episodes is to the very same place as that from which the "departure" began.  

All of this discussion has extremely important ramifications, not only for our understanding of ancient history, but also for our understanding of human consciousness.  If the consciousness can depart from the physical body, this has implications which suggest that the material world is not all that there is (contrary to the modern materialistic faith underpinning almost all of conventional scholarship today).  

Extensive evidence gathered from those who have undergone near-death experiences appears to bear this out, as Chris Carter asserts in his authoritative examination of the subject in his book Science and the Near-Death Experience: How Consciousness Survives Death.

Further, this pattern of ritual mystical death and rebirth infuses the patterns of many ancient writings and traditions (including esoterism, Gnosticism, and Christianity, among others).  One of the experiences testified to within the Pyramid Texts is that of rebirth during the voluntary death-like experience within the sarcophagus, during which the pharaoh was baptized, suckled by divine goddesses such as Hathor or Iat.

All of these themes have powerful implications for us today. Although they are among the earliest texts in existence, they speak to us at the cutting edge of the present in the twenty-first century, "precisely because," as Dr. Naydler writes, "in the prevailing culture of the West (and increasingly the modern world), we suffer from chronic amnesia concerning spiritual realities with which the ancients were relating on a daily basis" (144).  

He concludes that, "Insofar as we are able to acknowledge cultures of the past, not only as part of our own history but -- as Eliade says -- as part of what lies buried within the modern psyche, and insofar as we are able to incorporate and integrate them into our understanding of who we are today, we may open the way to reconnecting with that lost part of ourselves and that lost dimension of existence that was so present to the Egyptians and has become so absent from our modern awareness" (144).

Review of Jeremy Naydler's Shamanic Widsom in the Pyramid Texts

Below is a review of Jeremy Naydler's essential and outstanding text Shamanic Wisdom in the Pyramid Texts: The Mystical Tradition of Ancient Egypt.

Dr. Naydler argues that the current prevailing lens through which much of ancient Egyptian culture -- including the pyramids -- is viewed is incorrect.  

He provides extensive evidence and a clear argument that the funerary interpretation obscures the evidence that the pharaohs of ancient Egypt may well have used the pyramids for initiatory and mystical rites during which they deliberately underwent a death and rebirth experience that opened their consciousness to a world beyond ordinary material human experience -- as Dr. Naydler explains, "the king was brought to the threshold of death in order to travel into the spirit world" (120).

This argument is stunning in its implications, and (as Dr. Naydler demonstrates) completely upends the conventional paradigm that has dominated academia for over a century, which denies a mystical tradition in ancient Egypt -- primarily because such a possibility undermines the cult of progress which has dominated academia since the triumph of Darwinian materialism.  

As Dr. Naydler explains:

The assumption that modern materialistic science provides the only sure path to acquiring knowledge, and that true knowledge began with the Greeks not the Egyptians, to a large extent rests on a second deeply rooted assumption: that human history constitutes a steady progress not only of knowledge, but also of social organization and psychological and spiritual maturity.  Just as our knowledge today is considered to be more accurate and comprehensive than that of the past, so too our social and political forms are deemed more just and humane, and people today assume that they are more psychologically developed and enlightened than people of the past.  Thus the idea of progress not only works to our advantage, but it also disadvantages the past, for the earlier the culture, the more primitive it must have been.  32-33.

Dr. Naydler's work is thus extremely important on many levels.  The evidence that the pyramids may have been primarily for mystical rites undergone by the pharaoh on behalf of his people is compelling.  Among the most obvious is the fact that many of these sites contain sarcophagi which, when found, contained no burial remains -- even if the site was undisturbed when found.  In some cases, sarcophagi were found that were still sealed, and yet empty.  

Dr. Naydler argues that the pharaoh, guided by the priesthood, underwent a powerful death and rebirth experience, during which his consciousness became aware of the supernatural world and he or she experienced a cosmic ascent to the celestial realm, as well as a profound awareness that the end of material life was not the end of consciousness.  As a result of this experience, Dr. Naydler demonstrates, "the mystic knows that he or she is a spiritual being as well as a merely physical being" (121).  

He also shows how the language of the Pyramid Texts (among the oldest if not the oldest texts we can examine today) mirror the death and dismemberment and rebirth experience of shamanic tradition, as well as the cosmic ascent (by means of a ladder or by means of turning into a falcon, eagle, or other soaring bird) themes of shamanic tradition.

In Hamlet's Mill, Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend also noted this connection between the most ancient Egyptian texts and the shamanic tradition, but Dr. Naydler examines the connection in much greater detail.  The importance of the shamanic tradition for our understanding of human consciousness, the human experience, and human history has been discussed in other previous posts including this one, this one, and this one. 

Dr. Naydler's thesis also sheds important new light on celestial and mythical subjects central to those discussed on this blog and in the Mathisen Corollary book itself, including the theme of Osiris, Isis, Horus, and Seth, and the aspects of the heavens discussed in posts such as "The Undying Stars."

Author Lucy Wyatt has explored the possibility of ancient Egyptian shamanic consciousness further in her own work as well, including her book Approaching Chaos.  In fact, I became aware of Dr. Naydler's work through Lucy Wyatt's discussion of his thesis. 

Dr. Naydler's book is essential reading for anyone interested in ancient Egypt, and in the spiritual aspect of human experience in all eras, including our own.

Stonehenge

Besides being beautiful and awe-inspiring in its own right, and a testament to the technological and aesthetic achievements of ancient mankind, Stonehenge is also an incredibly important source of clues for unraveling the mystery of the timeline of ancient history.

Deer bones and other items from beneath the outermost earthen embankment which encircles the site have been dated to around 3100 BC. The entire site consists of concentric circles of embankments, post holes, and trilithons -- massive post-and-lintel arrangements of three stones arranged as two pillars with a lintel stone across the top. Inside the inner Sarsen circle is a horseshoe arrangement (not circular) of five massive trilithons composed of mighty blocks weighing up to fifty tons each.

The question of who built Stonehenge, how they did it, and why remains open for exploration. In his 1999 book, Ancient Celtic New Zealand, Martin Doutré argues that the angles and measurements of prominent details of Stonehenge indicate that the site actually contains a scale model of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

The diagram above (click for greater detail) presents a rough illustration of Mr. Doutré's theory. The concentric blue circles and the horizontal line indicate the positions of: 1. the inner trilithon horseshoe, 2. the Sarsen circle, 3. the Y-holes, and 4. the Aubrey circle. The red lines indicate the outline of the Great Pyramid based upon Doutré's discovery that the diameter of the outermost perimeter of the site measures 378 feet: exactly half of the 756 feet that each side of the Great Pyramid measures.

Based upon this, he discovered indications that the apex of a half-scale two-dimensional representation of the Great Pyramid rested in the avenue leading to the Heel Stone as indicated. His entire argument, which goes into much greater detail about this and many other important aspects of Stonehenge should really be read in its entirety in his book, Ancient Celtic New Zealand, which belongs in the library of everyone interested in the subject of our earth and mankind's ancient past upon our earth (which is everyone, right?).

This discovery is just one piece of evidence that the Great Pyramid might actually predate Stonehenge, and that Stonehenge might well have been built by the people who once occupied Egypt and left, or by their descendents.

It is also an indication of the advanced technological, mathematical, and astronomical advancement of very ancient mankind, as both the Great Pyramid and Stonehenge incorporate elements which indicate a sophisticated understanding of pi and phi and even (as many have noted before) knowledge of the size of the spherical earth itself.

The Great Pyramid is a model of the earth, on a scale of 1:43,200. The base perimeter of the Great Pyramid is 3,023.154 feet, which multiplied by 43,200 yields 130,600,523 feet -- a number that approximates within an error of 1% the circumfrence of the earth (as Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock demonstrate in Keeper of Genesis). Anyone wishing to argue that this is mere coincidence must contend with the fact that 43,200 is a clear precessional number, as explained in this previous post.

If Stonehenge is a one-half representation of the Great Pyramid, then it too is an accurate scale model of the earth.

For these and other reasons, Stonehenge is a critical source of clues to the truth about mankind's ancient past. In the Mathisen Corollary, I argue that the hydroplate theoryof Dr. Walt Brown, which deals primarily with geological evidence of a catastrophic flood within human memory, provides an excellent explanation that fits the archaeological and mythological evidence of man's past as well.

He explains why precession (which is encoded by the number 43,200 at the Great Pyramid and at Stonehenge, as we have just seen) was caused by this ancient catastrophe, and even suggests: "Perhaps changes in earth's spin axis in the centuries after the flood motivated construction of ancient observatories such as Stonehenge" (7th edition of In the Beginning, page 117).

These connections are important to examine very closely.