The message of the Sphinx: a quest for the hidden legacy of mankind (44 page)

[514]
Ibid., p. 273.

[515]
Cited in R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz,
Sacred Science,
op. cit., pp. 103-4. See also Henri Frankfort,
Kingship and the Gods,
op. cit., p. 90.

[516]
E. A. E. Reymond,
Mythical Origin of the Egyptian Temple,
op. cit., p. 59.

[517]
R. T. Rundle Clark,
Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt,
op. cit., p. 37.

[518]
P. dem Berlin,
13603. For the ancient traditions asserting that Heliopolis was originally founded in remote pre-Dynastic times see J. Norman Lockyer,
The Dawn of Astronomy,
op. cit., p. 74.

[519]
E. A. E. Reymond,
Mythical Origin of the Egyptian Temple,
op. cit., p. 122.

[520]
Ibid , pp. 121-2.

[521]
Margaret Bunson,
The Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt,
New York, Oxford, 1991, p. 110.

[522]
Ibid., p. 45.

[523]
E. A. Wallis Budge,
An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary,
op. cit., Vol. II, p. 958.

[524]
Flinders Petrie,
Royal Tombs
II, Pl.v,3, cited in E. A. E Reymond,
Mythical Origin of the Egyptian Temple,
p. 136.

[525]
E. A. E. Reymond,
Mythical Origin of the Egyptian Temple,
op. cit., p. 257. See also p. 262.

[526]
Ibid., p. 262.

[527]
Ibid., p. 114; see also R. T. Rundle Clark,
Myth and Symbol,
op. cit., p. 37ff.

[528]
Encyclopaedia Britannica,
9:393.

[529]
The Orion Mystery,
op. cit., p. 188.

[530]
Ibid., p. 17.

[531]
Ibid., pp. 203-4.

[532]
Ibid., p. 17.

[533]
R. T. Rundle Clark,
The Legend of the Phoenix,
University of Birmingham Press, 1949, p. 17.

[534]
The Orion Mystery,
op. cit., p. 212ff.

[535]
R. T. Rundle Clark,
Myth and Symbol,
op. cit., p. 246.

[536]
Robert K. G. Temple,
The Sirius Mystery,
Destiny Books, Rochester, Vt., 1987, p. 186.

[537]
E. A. Wallis Budge,
Hieroglyphic Dictionary,
op. cit., Vol. II, pp. 828-32.

[538]
Ibid., Vol. I, p. 11b.

[539]
Mark Lehner,
The Egyptian Heritage,
op. cit., p. 119.

[540]
E. A. Wallis Budge,
Hieroglyphic Dictionary,
op. cit., p. 11b.

[541]
See for example W. B. Emery,
Archaic Egypt,
op. cit., p. 22.

[542]
Manetho,
W. G. Waddell trans., Heinemann, London, 1940, p. 3, note 1.

[543]
R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz,
Sacred Science,
op. cit., p. 86; Lucy Lamy,
Egyptian Mysteries,
Thames & Hudson, London, 1986, pp. 68-9; Jane B. Sellers,
The Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt,
op. cit., p. 94.

[544]
Sacred Science,
op. cit., p. 86.

[545]
Ibid.

[546]
Jane B. Sellers,
The Death of Gods,
op. cit., p. 94.

[547]
E. A. Wallis Budge,
Hieroglyphic Dictionary,
op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 22-3.

[548]
Ibid.

[549]
Sacred Science,
op. cit.

[550]
Henri Frankfort,
Kingship and the Gods,
op. cit., p. 93.

[551]
Later known as Buto and Hierakonpolis respectively.

[552]
Frankfort,
Kingship,
op. cit., p. 94.

[553]
Ibid.

[554]
The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts,
R. O. Faulkner, trans., op. cit., lines 478 and 1717, pp. 94 and 253 respectively; Frankfort,
Kingship,
op. cit., pp. 93-5; R. T. Rundle Clark,
Myth and Symbol,
op. cit., pp. 122-3.

[555]
E. A. E. Reymond,
Mythical Origin of the Egyptian Temple,
op. cit., p. 122.

[556]
John Anthony West,
Serpent in the Sky,
op. cit., p. 1.

[557]
Manetho,
op. cit., p. xi.

[558]
Ibid, p. 3.

[559]
Ibid, p. 5.

[560]
Ibid, p. 15.

[561]
Ibid, p. 227.

[562]
Diodorus Siculus,
C. H. Oldfather trans. Harvard University Press, 1989, Vol. I, p. 157.

[563]
R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz,
Sacred Science,
op. cit., p. 111.

[564]
Skyglobe 3.6.

[565]
The Orion Mystery,
op. cit, p. 140ff.

[566]
The Orion Mystery,
op. cit, pp. 29 and 281, note 1. Details are as follows: Sneferu, about 9 million tons (two Pyramids at Dahshur) plus three Giza Pyramids (about 15 million tons) plus Abu Roash and Zawayat Al Aryan (about 1 million tons) = 25 million tons, i.e. about 75 per cent of the total volume of ‘Pyramid Age’ Pyramids (estimated at around 30 million tons).

[567]
See for example Ahmed Fakhry,
The Pyramids,
op. cit.

[568]
Hermetica,
op. cit,
Asclepius III
, 24b, p. 341.

[569]
Ibid, 25, p. 343.

[570]
See in particular Chapter 4.

[571]
Pyramid Texts,
op. cit. Utterances 471-3, pp. 160-1.

[572]
T. G. H. James,
Introduction to Ancient Egypt,
op. cit, p. 41.

[573]
Ibid.

[574]
See discussion in W. B. Emery,
Archaic Egypt,
op. cit, p. 42ff.

[575]
The Age of the God Kings,
Time-Life, 1987, p. 56ff.

[576]
See discussion in W. B. Emery,
Archaic Egypt,
op. cit, p. 42ff.

[577]
Even his name is put into doubt. According to Dr. Jaromir Malek, for example, the name of Menes ‘could be completely fictitious and based on a word-play which was misunderstood as a royal name by the later compilers of king-lists’ (Jaromir Malek,
In the Shadow of the Pyramids,
Orbis, London, 1986, p. 29). As for his other name, Narmer, this, too, is plagued with confusion and doubt. On the so-called votive mace-heads and palettes found at Hierakonpolis there is shown the image of a chieftain or ‘king’ and on the front of his face are shown certain hieroglyphic signs, in some cases forming the syllables ‘Nar-Mer’ and in others showing a scorpion. This has led Egyptologists to conclude that the Menes of the king-lists is this Narmer or ‘King Scorpion’ (ibid., pp. 28-9). To overcome the obvious confusion of having this presumed ‘last king of Predynastic Egypt’ bearing three names, Egyptologists have arrived at the unsatisfactory conclusion that the name ‘King Scorpion’ on the votive mace-head ‘is almost certainly wrong’ and that it must be regarded as some sort of ‘large ceremonial image’. Consequently ‘if King “Scorpion” is thus refuted,’ proposed Dr. Malek, then ‘the likeliest candidate for identification with the figure on the mace-head is Narmer’ (ibid., p. 29).

[578]
W. A. Fairservis Jr., ‘A Revised View of the Narmer Palette’, in
Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt,
XXVIII, 1991, pp. 1-20.

[579]
Jane B. Sellers,
The Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt,
op. cit., pp. 93-4.

[580]
Ibid., p. 90.

[581]
Ibid., p. 94.

[582]
Henri Frankfort,
Kingship and the Gods,
op. cit., pp. 18-19.

[583]
Ibid., p. 33.

[584]
Ibid., p. vi.

[585]
Sellers,
Death of Gods,
op. cit., p. 93.

[586]
Ibid., pp. 93ff, 115ff and 192ff. Having determined that the ancient Egyptians made use of the phenomenon of precession, Sellers then focused, to the exclusion of all else, on the idea that the ancients were tracking the heliacal rising of Orion at the spring equinox. With this in mind she based all her observations in the eastern horizon at the time of the spring equinox. This led her to make precessional calculations which bracketed the ‘Golden Age’ between 7300 BC and 6700 BC, the two epochs marking the beginning and end of Orion’s heliacal rising with the spring equinox (e.g. pp. 28 and 43). Although the core of her thesis that the key to the ancient mystery is to be found in the tracking of Orion’s precessional drift is spot on, her conclusion that the measurements are to be made at the rising in the east of Orion at the spring equinox is a curious error of judgement. For what is most surprising about Sellers’s analytical approach is that, while she correctly puts all the emphasis of her thesis on Orion and its precessional drift, she makes absolutely no reference to the most obvious astronomical ‘Orion marker’ in ancient Egypt: the ‘Orion’ star-shaft in the Great Pyramid. Indeed, Sellers completely ignores the Pyramids or any other structure in Egypt, and instead centres her attention only on the textual material. The fact is that the Pyramid builders and the compilers of the Pyramid Texts were not tracking Orion in the eastern horizon but high in the southern skies, at the meridian.

[587]
Precessional calculations show that we live in the astronomical ‘Last Time’ of Orion, with the belt stars in our epoch approaching the highest altitude at the meridian that they will ever attain in their precessional cycle.

[588]
Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend,
Hamlet’s Mill,
op. cit., p. 11.

[589]
Miriam Lichtheim,
Ancient Egyptian Literature,
Vol. I: The Old and Middle Kingdoms, p. 52.

[590]
Ibid., pp. 52-3.

[591]
Pyramid Texts,
op. cit., lines 1256-7, p. 200.

[592]
Ibid., 1278, p. 202.

[593]
For a brief review see Bunson,
The Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt,
op. cit., p. 130.

[594]
Ibid.

[595]
Pyramid Texts,
op. cit., 1657, p. 247.

[596]
Ibid., Utterance 610, p. 253.

[597]
Ibid., lines 2180-1, p. 305.

[598]
Ibid., lines 882-3, p. 155.

[599]
Sellers,
Death of Gods,
op. cit., pp. 90-3.

[600]
Selim Hassan,
Excavations at Giza,
op. cit., pp. 194ff.

[601]
Pap. Louvre 3292.

[602]
Ibid., and see
Excavations at Giza,
op. cit., p. 194.

[603]
Excavations at Giza,
op. cit., p. 195.

[604]
The following point made by E. A. E. Reymond in
The Mythical Origin of the Egyptian Temple,
op. cit., p. 57, is of obvious relevance. Referring to the content of Papyrus dem. Berlin 13603 he notes: ‘Heliopolis was regarded as the centre of creation. The primordial aspect of Heliopolis is not described; however, there is a clear allusion to the theory according to which Heliopolis existed before the Earth was created. From the primaeval Heliopolis, so it is explained in our text, the Earth-God created the Earth, which received the name
Mn-nfr,
Memphis.’

[605]
The Ancient Egyptian Coffin Texts,
R. O. Faulkner trans., Aris & Phillips, Warminster, Vol. III, Spell 1065.

[606]
Pyramid Texts,
op. cit., Utterance 477, p. 164.

[607]
Hassan,
Excavations at Giza,
op. cit., p. 198.

[608]
It is this ‘language’—a great, archaic, world-wide system—that is the principal focus of Giorgio de Santillana’s and Hertha von Dechend’s ground-breaking study
Hamlet’s Mill,
op. cit.

[609]
Lichtheim,
Ancient Egyptian Literature,
op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 55-6.

[610]
Pyramid Texts,
op. cit., lines 1716-17, p. 253.

[611]
Ibid., lines 1256-61, p. 200.

[612]
Ibid., 798-803, p. 144.

[613]
See, for example, Lewis Spence,
Ancient Egyptian Myths and Legends,
Dover Publications, New York, 1990, p. 106.

[614]
Coffin Texts,
op. cit., Spell 1035, Vol. III, p. 132. Interestingly, the Spell directly links the acquisition of knowledge concerning past and former skies to the desired attainment of immortal life and existence: ‘As for him who does not know this spell, he shall be taken into the infliction of the dead ... as one who is non-existent ...’

[615]
Sellers,
Death of Gods,
op. cit., p. 192.

[616]
Ibid., p. 193.

[617]
Ibid.

[618]
For a fuller discussion see
Fingerprints of the Gods,
op. cit., pp. 256ff.

[619]
Ibid., and see Sellers,
Death of Gods,
op. cit., p. 193.

[620]
Ibid., and see Sellers,
Death of Gods,
op. cit., pp. 192-209.

[621]
As pointed out in Chapter 10, the Egyptian royal cubit measures 20.6 inches.

[622]
Mary Bruck, ‘Can the Great Pyramid be Astronomically Dated?’,
m Journal of the British Astronomical Association,
105,4, 1995, p. 163.

[623]
Ibid., p. 164.

[624]
Ibid., p. 163.

[625]
Garth Fowden,
The Egyptian Hermes,
Cambridge University Press, 1987, p. 33. The reference is to the
Hermetica,
op. cit., the
Kore Kosmu,
5 and 6, pp. 459-61.

[626]
Interviewed in
The Search for Extraterrestrial Life,
Discovery Channel, June