Forbidden History: Prehistoric Technologies, Extraterrestrial Intervention, and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization (19 page)

PART
FOUR

SEARCHING FOR THE FOUNTAINHEAD

17
Megalithic England: The Atlantean Dimensions

A Conversation with John Michell

J. Douglas Kenyon

A
mong those who have argued in their writings that there was once a great and shining, albeit forgotten-to-history, fountainhead of civilization whose ghosts even now continue to haunt us, few have been more eloquent than John Michell.

The author of more than a score of works on ancient mysteries, sacred geometry, UFOs, unexplained phenomena, and the like, Michell is familiar to American readers primarily through his visionary classic
The View Over Atlantis
(a revised and rewritten version of this book, published in 1995, is entitled
The New View Over Atlantis
)
. The Earth Spirit
comprises Michell’s profusely illustrated essays on the ways, shrines, and mysteries of the subtle animating forces of the planet and their near universal celebration since the dawn of time.

Michell argues that across much of the earth are ancient earthworks and stone monuments built for an unknown purpose, and that their shared features suggest they might be part of a worldwide system that he believes served the elemental science of the archaic civilization that Plato called Atlantis. Michell suggests, in this connection, that the most significant modern discovery is that of leys, a mysterious network of straight lines that link the ancient places of Britain and have their counterparts in China, Australia, South America, and elsewhere.

In
The New View Over Atlantis,
the Cambridge-educated scholar’s vision of a high megalithic civilization with a mastery of principles far beyond present-day understanding is so thoroughly and beautifully worked out that it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to credit orthodox notions that the sources of our megalithic heritage were but Stone Age hunter-gatherer societies with little on their primitive minds but survival and procreation. In detailed descriptions of phenomena such as the precise terrestrial and celestial alignments of ancient monuments along long ley lines, advanced ancient sciences of numbers and sacred geometry, and sophisticated prehistoric engineering, Michell paints a picture of a vast and coherent worldwide order beyond anything imaginable today.

“We live within the ruins of an ancient structure,” he wrote in the first edition of
The New View Over Atlantis,
“whose vast size has hitherto rendered it invisible.” Emerging from current research is the awesome image of an ancient structure so great that its outlines have heretofore escaped understanding, one patiently awaiting our ascent to a sufficient height whence its masterful design, stretched out beneath us, can at last be appreciated.

Colin Wilson described
The View Over Atlantis
as “one of the great seminal books of our generation—a book which will be argued about for generations to come.” In an interview with
Atlantis Rising,
Michell was asked if he had been keeping up with the new research by Graham Hancock, Robert Bauval, and others into celestial alignments of the monument of Egypt’s Giza plane with the constellation Orion and other stars. He has, and hears an echo of evidence he has found in British sites in “much older stone,” where alignments with significant stars also indicate the route of the soul after death.

“Everywhere in the ancient world you see this terrific obsession with death, reflected in the orientation of monuments,” he observes. To him it seems plain that the ancients possessed a kind of science of immortality along the lines that Graham Hancock has suggested.

Unlike Colin Wilson, who theorizes that the ancients possessed advanced psychic faculties but had no technology as we understand the term, Michell believes it is very clear that they did. He sees it in their elaborate work of siting and constructing monuments well before the pyramids, and he sees it in their highly developed sciences of numbers and geometry.

“It’s truly just extraordinary that so many numerical harmonies are put into basically very simple structures,” he marvels, “and how they designed others to concentrate on the long term. In this very beautiful pattern is implied the kind of philosophy that says we can construct, here on Earth, the path to the heavens.” He cites the frequent use of the number 12, as in the twelve tribes of Israel and a connection with the twelve signs of the zodiac, hinting at an attempt to order life on Earth according to the pattern of things in the heavens.

The question of technology becomes more pressing, but even more difficult to answer, when one considers how the giant stones of ancient sites were actually cut, tooled, and moved. “It is a mystery, actually,” he concedes, “this incredible precision. And again in megalithic times, the extraordinary weights involved—raising blocks of one hundred tons or more, transporting them, and setting them up. They used terrific labor ingenuity and, no doubt, principles that aren’t recognized today.”

Could such principles have included some kind of levitation? “There are very persistent references from the Classical writers to the power of sound,” he says, “of the use of song and music and tone to make things lighter, work songs where there’s a rhythm got up, where you can move things without a lot of effort.”

Whatever lost secrets the ancients may have possessed, Michell believes that we can recover them and, in fact, will, when the time is right. “Human ingenuity is such that we can do anything we want. If [the ancient knowledge] was actually needed, then it would return again. There’s no doubt about that,” he says. As to the suggestion that we may have been left hidden caches of records such as the legendary Hall of Records in Egypt, he thinks it very likely that such treasure troves exist, but is not certain we will recognize them when we see them.

“Plato went on about a certain canon of law possessed by the ancient Egyptians by which numerical proportions and musical harmonies, which dominate a society, enable it to continue on the same level for literally thousands of years,” he explains. “Ancient civilization lasted far longer than we can conceive of today, so it seems to me that the whole society was based upon an understanding of the harmonies by which the universe is laid. And acting upon these by corresponding rituals, and that sort of thing, could hold the society together through crises.” However, he concedes, being sufficiently developed to appreciate the wisdom of such laws may be another matter.

The possibility that we may have begun, at least in some quarters, to resonate in harmony with the ancient chords of wisdom could open the door to a
return
of ancient wisdom. In religious stories such as the Revelation of Saint John, Michell sees the description of a “New Jerusalem” coming down ready-made through a parting of the heavens as the manifestation of an awakening and a wholesale change from the patterns of a previous age.

Such a revelation comes, he believes, from nature, and “it is invoked,” he says. “When we need it, we ask for it and it comes. Today, when people are so uncertain, I think we are looking for a truth and understanding that is beyond this world of chaos—of secular theories, and of all the scientific theories that follow one after the other but never establish anything—we’re looking for the higher truth that is always there. When we ask for
that,
we’ll get
that
.”

In a chaotic world where dissonance and dissonant music apparently reign supreme, there seems little hope that such a force can be overcome, but Michell remains optimistic. “It will overcome itself,” he says. “Certainly it has always been recognized that music is the most powerful of the arts. As Plato said, forms of government eventually follow the forms of music. That’s why the ancients were very careful in controlling music—no cacophony was allowed. The same music was heard at festivals every year and people were held under a kind of enchantment [whereby] the mind was held under one influence.

“Music is by far the most powerful means for therapy. Certainly the music—and the other art forms too—that we see now threatens chaos in society. It’s a vessel that not only reflects what happens but also actually determines what
will
happen. As to what will come about, I have no idea. I think more and more it’s in the hands of God and that there is now working out an alchemical process and that changes come about through nature—through the natural process of cause and effect. Things are chaotic and we have a reaction and a yearning for a source of order—there’s a quest for
that
and an invocation of
that,
and then there follows a
revelation
.”

Can the hoped-for change come without cataclysm? “Every man-made thing, every created thing comes to an end sooner or later,” Michell says. “It’s as inevitable as tomorrow’s sunrise that all these fruits shall have lain down. That which is artificial does not last long. Look at the fall of Communism. It seemed so assured, so completely in control, and it vanished practically overnght, destroyed by its own inherent contradictions. People just couldn’t stand it anymore. It’s so like the description of the fall of Babylon [in Saint John’s Revelation]. One day it’s going with all its wealth, parading its splendor, and the next day it’s as if it never had been. There is no doubt that all the institutions we know will collapse. As to how orderly this process will be? The further we go into megalomania and dependence on artificial systems, the more drastic will be the reaction.”

Michell sees a clear parallel between the destruction of Babylon described in the Book of Revelation and Plato’s description of the fall of Atlantis, and he believes the story is a warning about the danger in certain ordering: “Plato made it very clear he’s describing a geometrical pattern, the ground plan of Atlantis, which is actually not adequate—like a man-made thing—based on the number 10, where his ideal city was based on the number 12. He saw in Atlantis the mortal element prevailed and it collapsed . . .

“It is about an error in the foundation law,” Michell says, “which became more and more exaggerated and eventually led to the downfall of the whole thing. Life is bringing us through this process of revelation what was not even conceivable one hundred years ago or less—the idea of there being a cosmological pattern expressible numerically, geometrically, beautifully, which is the best possible reflection of the cosmos. That process establishes perfect patterns in one’s own mind and then later on becomes the pattern for society.

“Then, of course, again over many generations, what began as a revelation becomes the iron law and becomes unjust and leads to that process whereby the ideal turns into Babylon and is fit for destruction. The best possible cosmological pattern that is kept up in the institutes of society will enable the society to last for a very long time, but no material thing lasts forever. Eventually it turns into dust.”

But the good news, says Michell, is that human nature will always outlive any system of tyranny imposed upon it and, like the phoenix, will rise again. Today, he believes, we are living like bats in the ruins of a haunted house among the relics and ruins of the past, not just physically but also mentally, caught in outmoded forms of thought. If one is going to free oneself from the age-old spells, Michell says, one must challenge the dominant myths as he once did, with the most dominant theory of biology, evolution.

“It’s not exactly that they are wrong,” he explains. “It’s that they are partial and arbitrary. That’s the way they teach in school and college. You have to challenge them to get anywhere near adjusting your mind to the reality of things. If you take to heart anyone’s scientific explanation, you will have an uneasy life: for, as you know, the theories that are portrayed as certainties are always changing. If you believe what they tell you in school now, by the time you get to be my age you’ll be very old-fashioned indeed.”

18
Plato, the Truth

How Does the Credibility of the Best-Known Chronicler of Atlantis Stand Up?

Frank Joseph

The Egyptian legend of Atlantis also current in folk-tale along the Atlantic seaboard from Gibraltar to the Hebrides and among the Yorubas in West Africa is not to be dismissed as pure fancy.

R
OBERT
G
RAVES
,
T
HE
G
REEK
M
YTHS

A
s the only surviving report from antiquity describing Atlantis, Plato’s account is the single most important source of its kind at the disposal of investigators pursuing the lost civilization. His version continues to attract the attention of both skeptics seeking to debunk Atlantis, and true believers who contend that every word is quite literally factual. However, an impartial reading of Plato’s account as it is matter-of-factly presented in his dialogues, the
Timaeus
and the
Critias
, leaves most readers impressed that the events described so plainly might just as well be found in the more easily verified writings of Herodotus or Thucydides.

To be sure, gods, goddesses, and Titans are employed, as one may expect, to stand for the powers of nature, fate, and the remote past, just as they were called upon to do in virtually every other Greek history. As such, the myths were metaphors more than actual religious personages. But this is largely the story of men and events well within the realm of Mediterranean experience, and does not overly tax our imagination.

The story as it stands seems far less fabulous than factual, if only for its straightforward, unadorned rendering. As William Blackett wrote in his book
Lost History of the World
in 1881, “The case is put very differently by Plato. Divested of the simplicity of story-telling, and free from the concealment of mysticism and fancy, his account of the occurrence takes the form of a great historical event.”

The most common argument against the validity of the existence of Atlantis as presented in the
Timaeus
and the
Critias
is that Plato meant them to be understood merely as fictional recapitulations of his ideal state. While he obviously admires its high culture, Atlantis was
not
a mirror image of the society described in
The Republic
. There are very significant, nay, fundamental, differences between the two. His authoritarian ideal of a regime ruled by philosopher-kings was a single, race-conscious state, not a far-flung confederation of various peoples under the old system of monarchs constrained from wielding absolute power by a counsel of royal equals.

Even if Atlantis had been tailored after his work
The Republic
(which it was not), the addition of unnecessary, unphilosophic material (lengthy descriptions of architecture, racetracks, etc.) could not have illustrated any ideas that were not already thoroughly covered in
The Republic,
and would have therefore been so much superfluous repetition, something unparalleled in any of the man’s writings.

Moreover, Atlantis grows corrupt, the reason for its punishment by the gods, hardly the fate of a society Plato hoped to immortalize as his ideal. His story achieves a more proper perspective when we understand that it was not intended to stand alone as some kind of an anomaly among his other philosophic works, but was rather the first part of an unfinished anthology concerning the major events that most shaped the history of the world until his time. It would have been, by its very nature, an interpretive history, another work on philosophy.

The
Timaeus
deals with the creation of the world, the nature of man, and the first civilized societies. The
Critias,
which survives only in draft form, was to be a full account of the Atlanto-Athenian war and its aftermath; its final section was to describe the critical events of the recent past, up to the fourth century
B.C.E.
So, the Atlantis story was intended as part of a far greater project, but essentially no different in character from the rest of Plato’s writings. More significant, if his account was pure invention, it would not correspond as well as it does with accessible history, nor go on to logically fill so many gaps in our knowledge of pre-Classical antiquity by bridging such a great deal of otherwise disconnected, isolated information.

But Plato’s accuracy as historian could not be verified until our own century. His description of a holy spring that ran through the Acropolis was deemed entirely mythical until the discovery of Mycenaean potsherds from the thirteenth century
B.C.E.
showing a fountain in the midst of the Acropolis led some researchers to reconsider his account. Then, in 1938, renewed excavations revealed that earthquake activity had closed an underground spring beneath the Acropolis precisely where Plato said it had been. During the 1950s, joint teams of Greek, German, and American archeologists found their reconstruction of fifth-century-
B.C.E.
Athens matched Plato’s description of the city with unexpected exactitude. We have, therefore, every reason to assume his description of Atlantis is just as accurate. Both his identification of the fountain at the Acropolis and his precise knowledge of Athens reflect favorably on his historical reliability.

There is also some evidence that Plato’s account was not altogether unknown to the Greeks in Classical times before he set it to paper. At the Panathenaea Festival, held every year in Athens, women wore a peplum, a kind of skirt, embroidered with symbolic designs commemorating the goddess of their city. Some of the peplum depictions represented Athena’s victory over the forces of Atlantis, not a particularly remarkable fact in itself, except that the Panathenaea was founded 125 years before Plato’s birth.

The
Voyage to Atlantis,
rediscovered and tragically lost in modern times, was another earlier source, composed 150 years before Plato’s time by Dionysus of Miletus. A few other tantalizing fragments still exist, singed scraps from the incinerated Great Library of Alexandria, such as a fleeting reference to the second-century Roman writer Elianus, whose
Historia Naturalis
described how the rulers of Atlantis dressed to demonstrate their descent from Poseidon. The story was given special credence by another philosopher, Proklos, who told how Krantor, an early follower of Plato, seeking to validate the legend of Atlantis, in 260
B.C.E.
personally journeyed to the Egyptian temple at Sais. There he discovered the original tablets, which confirmed the account. Translated, they paralleled Plato’s narrative detail for detail.

Krantor was a prominent scholar at the Great Library of Alexandria, the center of Classical learning, where the story of Atlantis was generally regarded as a credible episode in history by the leading minds of the age, including the chief chronicler of the Roman Empire, Strabo. Long before its destruction, the Great Library apparently contained a good deal of supportive materials that almost universally convinced its researchers that Plato had described an actual city in the “outer ocean.”

It was only after the success of the Christian revolution that the facts concerning Atlantis, like most of “pagan” civilization, were lost. The story was condemned as heresy because it was not found in the Bible and because it supposedly predated God’s creation of the world in 5508
B.C.E.
, a date arrived at by the curious chronology of Christian theologians.

The subject remained closed until the discovery of America, when so many mysterious parallels between the New World and the Old reminded scholars of Plato’s Atlantic empire. Among the first was a sixteenth-century explorer and cartographer, Francisco Lopez de Gomara, who was struck by descriptions of an “opposite continent” (America) in the
Timaeus
. But the Alexandria of Classical antiquity was, after all, only seventy-five miles from Sais, and any investigator who wished to verify the details of Plato’s account did not have to travel far to read the tablets at the Temple of Neith.

According to the Roman historian Marcelinus (330–395
C.E.
), scholars at the Great Library knew of a geologic convulsion that “suddenly, by a violent motion, opened up huge mouths and so swallowed up portions of the Earth, as in the Atlantic sea, on the coast of Europe, a large island was swallowed up.” The historiographer Theopompus believed Plato’s story, as did the famous naturalist Pliny the Elder. The original source materials they once possessed, lost since the collapse of Classical civilization, and the fragmentary evidence remaining to us argue consistently on behalf of Plato’s credibility.

As Zadenk Kukal, a modern critic of the dialogues, has written, “It is probable that even if Plato had not written a single line about Atlantis, all the archeological, ethnographic, and linguistic mysteries that could not be explained would lead to some primeval civilization located somewhere between the cultures of the Old and New Worlds.”

R. Catesby Taliaferro writes in the foreword to the Thomas Taylor translation of the
Timaeus
and the
Critias,
“It appears to me to be at least as well attested as any other narration in any ancient historian. Indeed, he [Plato], who proclaims that ‘truth is the source of every good both to gods and men,’ and the whole of whose works consist in detecting error and exploring certainty, can never be supposed to have willfully deceived mankind by publishing an extravagant romance as matter of fact, with all the precision of historical detail.” Plutarch, the great Greek biographer of the first century
C.E.
, wrote in his
Life of Solon
that the Greek legislator cited in Plato’s story “had undertaken to put into verse this great history of Atlantis, which had been told to him by the wise men of Sais.”

The city itself played an important role in the Atlantis epic. It was one of the oldest major settlements in Egypt and served as the first capital of the Lower Nile after the unification, which was around 3100
B.C.E.
—in other words, at very start of dynastic, historic Egypt. As an indication of its and the Atlantean tablets’ antiquity, the Temple of Neith—where they were enshrined, was established by Pharaoh Hor-aha, the first dynastic king of a united Egypt.

Even Sonchis, the obscure character who told the story to Solon, was a historical figure whose very name contributes to the authenticity of the legend. Sonchis is a Greek derivation of the Egyptian god Suchos, known in his Nile homeland as Sebek. Sebek was a water deity who, appropriately enough, worshiped at Sais—where the Atlantis report was recorded—with his mother, Neith. It was in her temple, Plato wrote, that the tablets were preserved.

Neith was one of the very oldest of predynastic figures, the personification of the Waters of Chaos from which the Primal Mound, the First Land, arose. She was known as the keeper of the most ancient histories of both gods and men. The Minoan Mother Earth goddess and the Greek Athena are later manifestations of Neith. She fell into almost complete neglect after the passing of the Old Kingdom. But the First Birth-Giver experienced a popular revival during the Saite Period of the twenty-sixth dynasty, when her temple and its oldest records were restored—precisely the time Plato said Solon visited Egypt. Herodotus wrote that Pharaoh Ahmose had just finished refurbishing the Temple of Neith when Solon arrived in Sais.

It is difficult to believe that Plato went to such lengths of mythic and historic detail to create a mere fable. It is no less unlikely that he suspected any connections among the priest Sonchis; the god Sebek; his mother, the goddess Neith; and their intimate relation to the story of Atlantis recorded so appropriately and unearthed in so timely a fashion at Sais.

Another point worth noting: Krantor said the story was inscribed on tablets mounted on a pillar in the Temple of Neith, while the
Critias
tells that the royal proclamations in Atlantis were inscribed on tablets posted to a column in the Temple of Poseidon: The one seems to reflect and memorialize the other.

There are many unquestionably authentic touches throughout the narrative. For example, the
Critias
tells us that each of the wealthy leaders in Atlantean society was required to provide for the national armaments, including “four sailors to make up a compliment of twelve ships.” Although it fell out of use in Plato’s more “democratic” times, in Periclean days and for some centuries before, wealthy men known as Trierarchoi each had to undertake the funding of a warship, complete with crew and weapons.

Of course, many more of those fragments still existed, even in Classical times, when the story was generally accepted as a historical event. One of those believers was the geographer Poseidonous of Rhodes (130 to 50
B.C.E.
), who conducted his studies at Cadiz—the Gades in the
Critias
—in the Atlantean kingdom of Gadeiros. Strabo wrote of him, “[H]e did well in citing the opinion of Plato that the tradition concerning the island of Atlantis might be received as something more than fiction.” Modern critics are less generous. They continue to demean the story as nothing more than a fabulous allegory intended to dramatize principles already laid out in
The Republic,
with no basis in actual history except perhaps for a sketchy reference to Minoan Crete.