Freddy Silva, Common Wealth: The Origin of Places of Power and the Rebirth of Ancient Wisdom, Invisible Temple Books, Portland, Maine, 2010.
Silva’s focus is the legendary and actual powers and impacts of sacred sites all around the world including “holy mountains”, ancient temples, and configurations of megalithic “standing stones.” According to Silva, these locations can function as “repositories of knowledge” from which we can enter other dimensions and “otherworlds.” Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem was, for example, constructed upon such a foundation of massive “cyclopean” blocks of stone dating from pre-historic times, still visible in photographs of the “Wailing Wall.”
Silva sets out detailed evidence that the extensive and elaborate megalithic temple complex high in the Andes at Tiahuanaco in Bolivia may date back to almost 15,000 BC. Approximately ninety-nine upright megaliths, some 15’ high, are situated on surviving stone platforms totaling the size of a football stadium. One block of worked stone, used as a kind of loading pier, weighs an estimated 440 tons. A 16th-century Spanish account describes local indigenous people maintaining that Tiahuanaco’s colossal stone slabs “were carried through the air by the sound of a trumpet.” Metal clamps used to fasten these extensive walls and gateways together resemble those found, equally surprisingly, in the Great Pyramid and at Stonehenge.
In Lebanon, the temples at Baalbeck rest upon a foundation of rectangular blocks of stone each weighing 1,100 tons. On the platform, they supported stood fifty-four later-added pillars. Using astronomical calculations, Silva estimates the date of the Great Pyramid at Giza to be approximately 10,500 BC, thousands of years earlier than is usually taught today. On the south island of New Zealand, the basalt megalithic temple at Nan Dowas is said by the locals to have been erected by “two antediluvial 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 appropriate places.” When Easter Island was first discovered by Europeans, Silva notes, “an exceptionally tall second race still existed alongside the present local people. Legends told how “by words of their mouth they had been able to form the enormous statues” found there and they and the huge stones they came from had been “commanded to walk through the air”.
Silva explores not only the astonishing scale and creation legends of such centers but also the forces within the earth that ran through and between them and the many remnants of this early but strangely advanced civilization that remain. He describes in detail dozens of such complexes located all over the world along and presents a dazzling illustrative array of diagrams and photographs showing how their placement links them with each other with telluric forces, and underground streams within the earth.
Siva recounts as well his own strange “trans-dimensional” experiences within the Great Pyramid, including in the granite “sarcophagus” in the King’s Chamber. He describes the similar encounters of other visitors there, along with his equally unusual night at Stonehenge. People attuned to the right “frequencies”, Silva believes, can, in these potently charged locations, “cross over” into “deeper dimensions” and even attract such shifts. This is also a beautiful book. Diving into Silva’s epic and lavishly-illustrated Commonwealth is itself like a plunge into that extraordinary “other world” from long before our own that dates back to the earliest times.