The “esoteric tradition”, with which the mystic path is closely entwined, encompasses a deep-reaching view of our human history. Today we have tended to lose our understanding of all that human beings have been and created in past times and thus of who we truly are. Early human cultures and civilizations in some areas seemed to possess wisdom and capabilities greater than our own. Startling monumental constructions dating from extremely long-ago epochs are spread across the face of the earth. The Great Pyramid, with its over two million precisely cut stone blocks, is perhaps the most famous but there are hundreds, probably thousands, of others as well.
Sumer is among the first well-documented civilizations, revealing much about how developed human society began more than 5,000 years ago. Sir Leonard Wooley carried out early ground-breaking excavations at Ur in the 1920s and left the following account of a surprisingly well-developed, complex flowering that was viewed, in turn, as a “gift from the gods”.
“According to the Sumerians,” Wooley wrote “it was the god Enki who “taught (humans) the arts of writing and geometry, how to build cities and temples, who filled the Tigris and Euphrates with sparkling water and stocked them with fish.” The residences of the gods were believed to be the sky-stretching ziggurat towers and temples at their base. Even in their earliest days, the major Sumerian cities were dominated by the temple upon a raised shrine platform, later to become a multi-leveled ziggurat, of its resident god or goddess. Writing appears to have been developed largely for the administration of the temple economy.
The “god’s house” was a great self-contained unit with fields and tenant farmers, workshops and craftsmen, traders, merchants, servants, slaves, and a hierarchy of scribes, officials, and bureaucrats. In the temple kitchens at the base of each ziggurat, meals were prepared for the gods and presented to them in their shrines atop the ziggurat or in the temple below. Throughout the day and at intervals during the night the music of flutes, harps, and lyres and the chanting of hymns, prayers, and incantations resonated through the temple precinct, with each temple including a corps of singers and musicians. The ziggurat structure was cloaked with greenery and hanging gardens, bringing to mind the Biblical “hanging gardens of Babylon.”
What was created beside the Nile in Egypt at about the same time was even more startling and imposing. Engineer and author Christopher Dunn reminds us that the Great Pyramid at Giza is still the “largest, most precisely built, and most accurately aligned building ever constructed in the world” with no parallel in modern times. The Great Pyramid contains an estimated 2,300,000 blocks of stone, both limestone and granite, weighing between 2 ½ and 70 tons each, cut and fitted together with stunning precision. The ceiling of the King’s Chamber includes nine enormous red granite beams measuring up to twenty-seven feet long and weighing up to seventy tons each. Four more layers totaling seventy more massive red granite beams are positioned above them.
The Pyramid’s outer casing blocks, weighing 16-20 tons each, are square and level to within 1/100th of an inch over a span of thirty feet and are fitted together with only 1/125th of an inch between them. Inside this gap, cement was used that bonded them together so tightly that the strength of these joints is greater than the limestone itself. The total thirteen-acre base of the Great pyramid is only 7/8 of an inch from being totally level and even this may be the result of gradual subsiding of the ground below. The Great Pyramid is today oriented to within 3 minutes of a degree from true north. When it was built, this alignment may have been even more perfect. his degree of perfection, Dunn writes, is beyond that found in any contemporary building. When Dunn is told that these results were achieved by primitive people using crude hammers and chisels, he just laughs.
Eric Von Daniken was aware that discovering our true past required breaking out of our usual, well-inculcated mental boxes, observing that:
“If we want to set out on the arduous search for truth, we must summon up the courage to leave the lines along which we have thought until now and as the first step begin to doubt everything we have previously accepted as correct and true. Can we still afford to close our eyes and stop up our ears because new ideas are supposed to be heretical? What would happen if we dared to take off our blinders and look at the old things with fresh eyes?”
Graham Hancock’s Magicians of the Gods, takes us along on Hancock’s journey of exploration of some of the world’s earliest remains, beginning at Gobekli Tepi in eastern Turkey. The hundreds of towering megalithic pillars at Gobekli Tepe are believed to date from around 10,000 BC, making them likely the oldest large-scale human creations yet discovered. They are over twenty feet high with a weight of around twenty tons. Many are elaborately carved with diverse animal figures. As at other ancient sites, the earlier the work took place the more expert and sophisticated it seems to be. The Sumerian, Babylonian, and Assyrian cultures all later emerged downstream from Gobekli Tepe.
Hancock next visits the subterranean complex at Derinkuyu, also in eastern Turkey and also estimated to have been created around 10,000 BC. Derinkuyu, Hancock writes:
“…is a complex and cunning labyrinth on an immense scale- a work of astonishing architectural complexity that would be impressive if it had been built above ground, but that is utterly breathtaking when one considers that it all had to be mined, chiseled, hammered, cut and gauged out of the volcanic bedrock…like a gigantic rabbit warren extending over an area of more than four square kilometers… and Derinkuyu is just one of two hundred such subterranean complexes identified in (that part of) Turkey.”
Hancock then continues to Lebanon where the three “monstrous” blocks of the “Trilithium” that comprised part of the megalithic temple at Baalbeck each weigh over 800 tons. Cut but still remaining in their nearby quarry are two even more gigantic blocks of 970 and 1650 tons. Hancock records that, “I spend some hours climbing around these weird, otherworldly blocks. The scale is so immense and in a way so ‘alien’. I feel as though I’m mountaineering.”
His next stop is the fortress of Sacsayhuaman outside the old Inca capital of Cuzco in Peru with its “cyclopean” stone walls. This isn’t his first visit to Sacsayhuaman, but each time he is amazed by what he finds there. As Hancock recounts:
“When you are building a wall in which the smallest block you plan to use weighs a ton, while the majority weigh over 20 tons, where many weigh 100 tons, some weigh 200 tons and a few weigh more than 300 tons, you have already set yourself a formidable logistical challenge. But then suppose, just for the hell of it, you decide to up the ante a little more and insist that these walls must be constructed in the form of huge three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles. Every block has to be a polygon with anywhere between six and a dozen sides, every polygon has to be different – no two alike – and they must all fit together with one another so tightly that you won’t be able to get a razor blade between the joints.”
Hancock is at Sacsayhuaman with his Inca guide:
“We’re standing in a corner at a juncture of a dozen or so of these incredible blocks. My guide highlights again the precision of their joints that look as though some modern machine tool has been at work, and the daunting complexity of the patterns they form… ‘No tool marks,’ he reiterates. ‘No chisels. No hammers.’ So how, (Hancock asks), did they do it?’
‘Doesn’t it look,’ his guide replies, ‘like they worked with the stone when it was soft?…Like butter? So they could mold everything together?’
Suddenly all becomes clear. The strange shapes I’m seeing in the rock would be easy, indeed effortless, to create if these blocks were made of something of the consistency of room-temperature butter, instead of cold, hard limestone.”
Researchers have concluded that the blocks had been subjected to intense heat between the time they were quarried and the time when they were placed into the walls. The joints between the blocks, Hancock observes, seem molded together. There is, in addition, a curious glassy sheen around the joints, which his guide believes is evidence of “vitrification caused by exposure to intense heat”. Indeed, what may be the “vitrified” elements appear to form a clear skin over the underlying blocks. The above are just examples of the innumerable puzzling wonders of our own very distant past. What do they all add up to? The discovery that our history, our heritage, and we ourselves are revealed as far more than we have thought they are.
We are, Hancock writes, “a species with amnesia.” Recounting new restrictions on public access to Gobekli Tepe and lack of archeological interest in further probing of other nearby, equally remarkable sites, he adds that:
“It feels almost like a deliberate, calculated act of disempowerment- as though someone among the powers that be suddenly woke up and realized how dangerous this ancient place has become to the established order of things and how subversive it potentially is to the system of mind control, very much including control of the past, that keeps modern society in order.”
Hancock is aware he is operating, writing, and thinking outside the bounds of conventional, academically based archeology, telling us that academic archeologists often give him the “evil eye” when he shows up and wants to probe their digs.
Academic archeology, Hancock writes:
“…is a deeply conservative discipline and I have found that archeologists, no matter where they are working, have a horror of questioning anything their predecessors and peers have already announced to be true.”
This is certainly true, Hancock might have added, in the field of history and many others as well.
“Archeological explorers,” Hancock adds, “run a real risk of jeopardizing their careers if they do. In consequence, they focus-perhaps to a large extent subconsciously – on evidence and arguments that don’t upset the apple cart…God forbid that anything should be discovered that might undermine the established paradigm.”
The research of scholars like Hancock and others shows we have still only barely begun to comprehend the staggering enormity of our lost bequest, of who and what we have been and are still capable of being.
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Copyright 2022 Will Gold.