a year seems only as a day.’33
In the Surya Siddhanta, an ancient Indian text, we read, ‘The gods
behold the sun, after it has once arisen, for half a year.’34 The seventh
Mandala of the Rigveda contains a number of ‘Dawn’ hymns. One of
these (VII, 76) says that the dawn has raised its banner on the horizon
with its usual splendour and reports in Verse 3 that a period of several
days elapsed between the first appearance of the dawn and the rising of
30 Ibid., p. 58.
31 See Part IV.
32 The Mahabaratha, cited in The Arctic Home in the Vedas, pp. 64-5.
33 Ibid., pp. 66-7.
34 Cited in Paradise Found: The Cradle of the Human Race at the North Pole, p. 199.
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the sun that followed it.35 Another passage states, ‘many were the days
between the first beams of the dawn and actual sunrise’.36
Are these eyewitness accounts of polar conditions?
Although we can never be sure, it may be relevant that in Indian
tradition the Vedas are believed to be revealed texts, passed down from
the time of the gods.37 It may also be relevant that in describing the
processes of transmission, all the traditions refer to the pralayas
(cataclysms) which occasionally overtake the world and claim that in each
of these the written scriptures are physically destroyed. After each
destruction, however, certain Rishis or ‘wise men’ survive who
repromulgate, at the beginning of the new age, the knowledge inherited by them
as a sacred trust from their forefathers in the preceding age ... Each manvantara
or age thus has a Veda of its own which differs only in expression and not in
sense from the antediluvian Veda.38
An epoch of turmoil and darkness
As every schoolboy geographer understands, true north (the North Pole)
is not quite the same thing as magnetic north (the direction compass
needles point). Indeed the magnetic north pole is presently situated in
northern Canada, about 11 degrees from the true North Pole.39 Recent
advances in the study of palaeomagnetism have proved that the earth’s
magnetic polarity has reversed itself more than 170 times during the past
80 million years ...40
What causes these field reversals?
While he was teaching at the University of Cambridge the geologist S. K.
Runcorn published an article in Scientific American which made a
pertinent point:
There seems no doubt that the earth’s magnetic field is tied up in some way to the
rotation of the planet. And this leads to a remarkable finding about the earth’s
rotation itself ... [The unavoidable conclusion is that] the earth’s axis of rotation
has changed also. In other words, the planet has rolled about, changing the
location of the geographical poles.41
Runcorn appears to be envisaging a complete 180-degree flip of the
poles, with the earth literally tumbling—although similar palaeomagnetic
readings would result from a slippage of the crust over the geographical
poles. Either way, the consequences for civilization, and indeed for all
life, would be unimaginably dreadful.
35 Arctic Home in the Vedas, p. 81.
36 Ibid., p. 85.
37 Ibid., pp. 414, 417.
38 Ibid., p. 420.
39 Pole Shift, p. 9.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid., p. 61.
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Of course, Runcorn may be wrong; perhaps field reversals can occur in
the absence of any other upheavals.
But he may also be right.
According to reports published in Nature and New Scientist, the last
geomagnetic reversal was completed just 12,400 years ago—during the
eleventh millennium BC.42
This is of course the very millennium in which the ancient Tiahuanacan
civilization in the Andes seems to have been destroyed. The same
millennium is signalled by the alignments and design of the great
astronomical monuments on the Giza plateau, and by the erosion
patterns on the Sphinx. And it was in the eleventh millennium BC that
Egypt’s ‘precocious agricultural experiment’ suddenly failed. Likewise it
was in the eleventh millennium BC that huge numbers of large mammal
species all around the world vanished into extinction. The list could
continue: abrupt rises in sea level, hurricane-force winds, electrical
storms, volcanic disturbances, and so on.
Scientists expect the next reversal of the earth’s magnetic poles to
occur around AD 2030.43
Is this an intimation of planetary disaster? After 12,500 years of the
pendulum, is the hammer about to strike?
Exhibit 11
Yves Rocard, Professor of the Faculty of Sciences at Paris: ‘Our modern
seismographs are sensitive to the ‘noise’ of limited agitation at every
point in the earth, even in the absence of any seismic wave. One may in
this noise discern a man-made vibration (for example, a train four
kilometers away, or a big city ten kilometers off) and also an atmospheric
effect (from changing pressure of the wind on the soil) and sometimes
one registers also the effects of great storms at a distance. Yet there
remains a continued rolling noise of cracklings in the earth which owes
nothing to any [such] cause ...’44
Exhibit 12
‘The North Pole moved ten feet in the direction of Greenland along the
meridian of 45 degrees west longitude during the period from 1900 to
1960 ... a rate of six centimetres (about two and a half inches) a year.
[Between 1900 and 1968, however,] the pole moved about twenty feet.
[The pole therefore] moved ten feet between 1960 and 1968, at a rate of
42 Nature, volume 234, 27 December 1971, pp. 173-4; New Scientist, 6 January 1972, p.
7.
43 J. M. Harwood and S. C. R. Malin writing in Nature, 12 February 1976.
44 The Path of the Pole, op. cit., Appendix, pp. 325-6.
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about ten centimetres (four inches) a year ... If both these observations
were accurate when made, as we have every right to expect in view of the
eminence of the scientists involved, then we have here evidence that the
lithosphere may be in motion at the present time [and that it is
experiencing] a geometrical acceleration of the rate of motion ...45
Exhibit 13
USA Today, Wednesday 23 November 1994, page 9D:
‘INTERACTIVE IN ANTARCTICA: Students Link With South Pole
Scientists
‘A live remote broadcast from the South Pole featuring Elizabeth Felton,
a 17-year-old graduate of Chicago public schools, will take place Jan 10.
Felton will use US Geological Survey data to reposition the copper marker
designating the Earth’s geographic South Pole to compensate for the
annual slippage of the ice sheet.’46
Is it just the ice sheet that is slipping, or is the entire crust of the earth
in motion? And was it just an ‘unusual interactive education project’ that
took place on 10 January 1995, or was Elizabeth Felton unknowingly
documenting the continued geometrical acceler
ation of the rate of
motion of the crust?
Scientists do not think so. As we shall see in the final chapter, however,
the coming century is signalled in a remarkable convergence of ancient
prophecies and traditional beliefs as an epoch of unprecedented turmoil
and darkness, in which iniquity will be worked in secret, and the Fifth Sun
and the Fourth World will come to an end ...
Exhibit 14
Kobe, Japan, Tuesday 17 January 1995: ‘The suddenness with which the
earthquake struck was almost cruel. One moment we were fast asleep, an
instant later the floor—the entire building—had turned to jelly. But this is
no gently undulating liquid motion. This is jarring, gut-wrenching
shuddering of awesome proportions ...
‘You are in bed, the safest place in the world. Your bed is on the floor,
what you used to think of as solid ground. And with no warning the world
has turned into a sickening roller-coaster ride, and you want to get off.
‘Possibly the most frightening part is the sound. This is not the dull
rumble of thunder. This is a deafening, roaring sound, coming from
everywhere and nowhere, and it sounds like the end of the world.’
(Eyewitness report on the Kobe earthquake by Dennis Kessler, Guardian,
45 Ibid., p. 44.
46 USA Today, 23 November 1994, p. 9D.
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London, 18 January 1995. The tremor lasted 20 seconds, registering 7.2
on the Richter scale, and killed more than 5000 people.)
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Chapter 52
Like a Thief in the Night
There are certain structures in the world, certain ideas, certain intellectual
treasures, that are truly mysterious. I am beginning to suspect that the
human race may have placed itself in grave jeopardy by failing to
consider [the implications of these mysteries.
We have the ability, unique in the animal kingdom, to learn from the
experiences of our predecessors. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for
example, two generations have grown to adulthood in awareness of the
horrific destruction that nuclear weapons unleash. Our children will be
aware of this too, without experiencing it directly, and they will pass it on
to their children. Theoretically, therefore, the knowledge of what atom
bombs do has become part of the permanent historical legacy of
mankind, whether we choose to benefit from that legacy or not is up to
us. Nevertheless the knowledge is there, should we wish to use it,
because it has been preserved and transmitted in written records, in film
archives, in allegorical paintings, in war memorials, and so on.
Not all testimony from the past is accorded the same stature as the
records of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On the contrary, like the Canonical
Bible, the body of knowledge that we call ‘History’ is an edited cultural
artefact from which much has been left out. In particular, references to
human experiences prior to the invention of writing around 5000 years
ago have been omitted in their entirety and myth has become a synonym
for delusion.
Suppose it is not delusion?
Suppose that a tremendous cataclysm were to overtake the earth today,
obliterating the achievements of our civilization and wiping out almost all
of us. Suppose, to paraphrase Plato, that we were forced by this
cataclysm ‘to begin again like children, in complete ignorance of what
had happened in early times’.1 Under such circumstances, ten or twelve
thousand years from now (with all written records and film archives long
since destroyed) what testimony might our descendants still preserve
concerning the events at the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in
August 1945 of the Christian era?
It is easy to imagine how they might speak in mystical terms of
explosions that gave off a ‘terrible glare of light’ and ‘immense heat’.2
Nor would we be too surprised to find that they might have formulated a
‘mythical’ account something like this:
1 Plato, Timaeus and Critias, Penguin Classics, 1977, p. 36.
2 The Bhagavata Purana, Motilal Banardass, Delhi, 1986, Part I, pp. 59, 95.
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The flames of the Brahmastra-charged missiles mingled with each other and
surrounded by fiery arrows they covered the earth, heaven and space between and
increased the conflagration like the fire and the Sun at the end of the world ... All
beings who were scorched by the Brahmastras, and saw the terrible fire of their
missiles, felt that it was the fire of Pralaya [the cataclysm] that burns down the
world.3
And what of the Enola Gay which carried the Hiroshima bomb? How might
our descendants remember that strange aircraft and the squadrons of
others like it that swarmed through the skies of planet earth during the
twentieth century of the Christian era? Isn’t it possible, probable even,
that they might preserve traditions of ‘celestial cars’ and ‘heavenly
chariots’ and ‘spacious flying machines’, and even of ‘aerial cities’.4 If
they did, would they perhaps speak of such wonders in mythical terms a
little like these:
• ‘Oh you, Uparicara Vasu, the spacious aerial flying machine will come
to you—and you alone, of all the mortals, seated on that vehicle will
look like a deity.’5
Gods.’6
• ‘Oh you descendant of the Kurus, that wicked fellow came on that alltraversing automatic flying vehicle known as Saubhapura and pierced
me with weapons.’7
• ‘He entered into the favourite divine palace of Indra and saw thousands
of flying vehicles intended for the Gods lying at rest.’8
• ‘The Gods came in their respective flying vehicles to witness the battle
between Kripacarya and Arjuna. Even Indra, the Lord of Heaven, came
with a special type of flying vehicle which could accommodate 33
divine beings.’9
All these quotations have been taken from the Bhagavata Purana and
from the Mahabaratha, two drops in the ocean of the ancient wisdom
literature of the Indian subcontinent. And such images are replicated in
many other archaic traditions. To give one example (as we saw in Chapter
Forty-two), the Pyramid Texts are replete with anachronistic images of
flight:
3 Ibid., p. 60.
4 Dileep Kumar Kanjilal, Vimana in Ancient India, Sanskrit Pustak Bhandar, Calcutta,
1985, p. 16.
5 Ibid., p. 17.
6 Ibid., p. 18.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid., p. 19.
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The King is a flame, moving before the wind to the end of the sky and to the end
of the earth ... the King travels the air and traverses the earth ... there is brought
to him a way of ascent to the sky ...10
Is it possible that the constant references in archaic literatures to
something like aviation could be valid historical testimony concerning the
achievements of a forgotten and remote technological age?
We will never know unless we try to find out. And so far we haven’t
tried because our rational, scientific culture regards myths and traditions
as ‘unhistorical’.
No doubt many are unhistorical. but at the end of the investigation that
underlies this book, I am certain that many others are not ...
For the benefit of future generations of mankind
Here is a scenario:
Suppose that we had calculated, on the basis of sound evidence and
beyond any shadow of a doubt, that our civilization was soon to be
obliterated by a titanic geological cataclysm—a 30° displacement of the
earth’s crust, for example, or a head-on collision with a ten-mile-wide
nickel-iron asteroid travelling towards us at cosmic speed.
Of course there would at first be much panic and despair.
Nevertheless—if there were sufficient advance warning—steps would be
taken to ensure that there would be some survivors and that some of
what was most valuable in our high scientific knowledge would be
preserved for the benefit of future generations.
Strangely enough, the Jewish historian Josephus (who wrote during the
first century AD) attributes precisely this behaviour to the clever and
prosperous inhabitants of the antediluvian world who lived before the
Flood ‘in a happy condition without any misfortunes falling upon them’:11
They also were the inventors of that peculiar sort of wisdom which is concerned
with the heavenly bodies, and their order. And that their inventions might not be
lost—upon Adam’s prediction that the world was to be destroyed at one time by
the force of fire, and at another time by the violence and quantity of water—they
made two pillars, one of brick, the other of stone: they inscribed their discoveries
upon them both, that in case the pillar of brick should be destroyed by the Flood,
the pillar of stone might remain and exhibit these discoveries to mankind; and
also inform them that there was another pillar of brick erected by them ...12
Likewise, when the Oxford astronomer John Greaves visited Egypt in the
seventeenth century he collected ancient local traditions which attributed
the construction of the three Giza pyramids to a mythical antediluvian
king:
10 The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, p. 70, Utt. 261.
11 The Complete Works Of Josephus, Kregel Publications, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1991,