THE DIVINE COMEDY

OF

DANTE ALIGHIERI (1265-1321)

THE FLORENTINE

CANTICA I

HELL

(L'INFERNO)

INTRODUCTION

Page 9

"Midway this way of life we're bound upon

I woke to find myself in a dark wood,

Where the right road was wholly lost and gone."

WAKEFIELD EXPRESS

Friday April 15 2011

Page 73

Sport

Sports editor Steve Heptinstall, deputy sports editor Mark Berry, sports reporter Nick Rigg

MILESTONE: The city's oldest continuous amateur rugby league club - Stanley Rangers - is holding a reunion of former players on Friday, May 20, 2011. The club was formed in 1918.Organisers have already contacted several past players, but they're urging family and friends to spread the word to those who have moved out of the area. The club is also trying to trace its oldest living former player. Pictured above is one of Stanley's successful teams from the early 1960s.

The full line up is, back from left, Henry White, Terry Clarkson, Arthur Wright, Dave Denison, Tony Hammond, Peter Hammond, Ronnie Stead, Derek Fox. Front, Alwyn Shepherd, Geoff Bateman, Les Starkey, Tony Peters, Henry Parkin.

Photograph omitted

Rugby Leaguer & League Express - www.totalrl.com 13th June 2011

Page 12

9s RUGBY LEAGUE NINES - RUGBY LEAGUE NINES 9s

Nine the magic number?

The Rugby Football League launched it's shortened version of the game at four different venues last Tuesday.

Martin Butcher reflects on the night at Derwent Park

9s

RUGBY LEAGUE

An inquisitive crowd assembled at Derwent Park to see nines Rugby League played in Cumbria for the first time

"NINE THE MAGIC NUMBER"

THISISTHESCENEOFTHESEENUNSEENTHEUNSEENSEENOFTHESCENEUNSEENTHISISTHESCENE

KEEPER OF GENESIS

A QUEST FOR THE HIDDEN LEGACY OF MANKIND

Robert Bauval Graham Hancock1996

Page 252

Chapter 16

Message in a Bottle?

'We have reached this fascinating point in

our evolution ... we have reached the time

when we know we can talk to each other

across the distances between the stars ...'

Dr John Billingham, NASA Ames Research Center, 1995.

Together with the ancient texts and rituals that are linked to them, could the vast, monuments of the Giza necropolis-have been designed to transmit a message from one culture to another - a message not across space, but across' time?

Egyptologists reply to such questions by rolling their eyes and hooting derisively. Indeed they would not be 'Egyptologists' (or at any rate they could not long remain within that profession) if they reacted with anything other than scorn and disbelief to suggestions that the necropolis might be more than a cemetery, that the Great Sphinx might significantly predate the epoch of 2500 BC, and that the Pyramids might not be just 'royal tombs'. By the same token, no self­respecting Egyptologist would be prepared to consider, even for a moment, the outlandish possibility that some sort of mysterious 'message'imight have been encoded into the monuments.

So whom should we turn to for advice when confronted by what we suspect may be a message from a civilization so far distant from us in time as to be almost unknowable?

Anti-cipher.

The only scientists actively working on such problems today are those involved in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence - SETI for /Page 253/ short. They endlessly sweep the heavens for messages from distant civilizations and they have therefore naturally had to give some thought to what might happen if they ever did identify. such a message. According to Dr Philip Morisson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:

To begin with we would know very little about it. If we received it we would not understand what we're getting, But we would have an unmistakable.signal, full of structure, full of'challenge. The best people would try to decode it, and it will be easy to do because those who have constructed it would have made it easy to decode, otherwise there's no point. This is anti-cryptography: 'I want to make a message for you, who never got in touch with any symbols of mine no key no clue, nevertheless you'll be able to read it . . .' I would have to fill it full of clues and unmistakable clever devices . .'1

In his book, Cosmos, Professor Carl Sagan of Cornell University makes much the same point and does, curiously enough, with reference to the ancient Egyptian hierogiyphic system. He explains that the 'Egyptian hieroglyphics are, in.significant part, a simple substitution cipher, But not evcry hieroglyph is a letter or syllable. Some are pictographs. . . 'When it came to translation, this mix of letters and pictographs caused some grief for interpreters . . .' In the early nineteenth century, however, a breakthrough was made by the French scholar Champollion who deciphered the famous 'Rosetta Stone', a slab of black basalt bearing identical inscnptions in Egyptian hieroglyphics and in Greek. Since Champollion could read the Greek, all he needed was, some kind of 'key' to relate specific hieroglyphs to specific Greek words or letters.This key was provided by the constant repetition in the Greek texts of the name of Pharaoh Ptolemy V and an equal number of repetitons in the Egyptian text of a distinctive oblong enclosure - known as a cartouche - containing a repeated group of hieroglyphs, As Sagan comments:

The cartouches were the key . . . almost as though the Pharaohs of Egypt had circled their own names to make the going easier for Egyptologists two thousand years in the future . . . What a joy it must have been [for Champollion] to-open this one-way communication channel with another civilization, to permit a culture that had been /page/ 254/ mute for millenia to speak of its history, magic, religion politics and philosophy.2

Professor Sagan then offers a comparison that is highly apposite to our present-inquiry. 'Today,' he says:

we are again seeking messages from an ancient and exotic civilization, this time hidden from us not only in time, but in space. If we should receive a radio message from an extraterrestrial civilization, how could it possibly be understood? Extraterrestrial intelligence will be elegant, complex, internally consistent and utterly alien. Extraterrestrials would, of course, wish to make a message sent to us as comprehensible, as possible. But how could they? Is there in any sense an interstellar Rosetta Stone? We believe there is a common language that all technical civilizations, no matter how different, must have. That common language is science and mathematics. The laws of Nature are the same everywhere?

It seems to us that if there is indeed a very ancient 'message' at Giza then it is likely to be expressed in the language of science and mathematics that Sagan identifies - and for the same reason. Moreover, given its need to continue 'transmitting' coherently across thousands of years (and chasms of cultural change), We think that the composer of such a message would be likely to make use of the Precession of the Equinoxes, the one particular 'law of Nature' that can be said to govern, and measure - and identify - long periods of terrestrial time.

Durable vehicles

The Pyramids and the Great Sphinx at Giza are, above all else, as elegant, -as complex, as internally consistent and as utterly 'alien' as the extraterrestrial intelligence that Sagan envisages (alien in the sense of the tremendous, almost superhuman scale of these structures and of their uncanny -. and in our terms apparently unnecessary ­ precision).

Moreover, returning briefly to Dr Philip Morisson's remarks quoted. earlier, we think that the Giza necropolis also qualifies rather well for the description 'packed full of clues and unmistakable clever devices'.4 Indeed, it seems to us that a truly astonishing quantum of /Page 255/ ingenuity was invested by the Pyramid builders to ensure that the four fundamental aspects of an 'unmistakable' message were thoroughly elaborated here:

1 the creation of durable, unequivocal markers which could serve as beacons to inflame the curiosity and engage the intelligence of future generations of seekers;

2 the use of the ' common language' of precessional astronomy; the use of precessional co-ordinatesto signal specifictime ­ referents linking past to present and present to future;

4 Cunningly concealed store-rooms, or 'Halls of Records' that could only be found and entered by those who were fully initiated-in the 'silent language' and thus could read and follow its clues.

In addition, though the monuments are enabled to 'speak' from the moment that their astronomical context is understood, we, have also to consider the amazing profusion of funerary texts that have come down to us from all periods of Egyptian history - all apparently emanating. from the same very few common sources.5 As we have seen, these texts operate like 'software' to the monuments hardware', charting the route that the Horus-King (and all other future seekers) must follow.

We recalL a remark made by Giorgio de Santillana and.Hertha von Dechend in Hamlet's Mill to the effect that the great strength of myths as vehicles for specific technical information is that they are.capable of transmitting that information independently of the knowledge of individual story-tellers.6 In other words as long as a myth continues to be told true, it will also continue to transmit any higher message that may be concealed within its - structure even if neither the teller nor the hearer understands that message.

So, too, we suspect, with the ancient Egyptian funerary. texts, We would be surprised.if the owners of many: of the coffins and tomb walls-onto which. they were copied had even the faintest inkling.that specific astronorni;;al observations and directions were being duplicated at their expense. What motivated them was .precisely what the texts offered - the lure of immortal life. Yet by taking that lure did they, not in fact guarantee a kind of irnmortality for the texts themselves. Did they not ensure that so many faithful copies would /Page 256/ be made that some at least would be bound to survive for many thousands of years?

We think that there were always people who understood the true 'science of immortality' connected to the texts, and who were able to read the astronomical allegories in which deeper secrets, not granted to the common herd, lay concealed. We presume that these people were once called the 'Followers of Horus', that they operated as an invisible college behind the scenes in Egyptian prehistory and history, that their primary cult centre was at Giza-Heliopolis, and that they were responsible for the initiation of kings and the realization of blueprints. We also think that the timetables they worked to - and almost everything of significance that they did - was in one way or another written in the stars.

Hints and Memories

The powerfully astronomical character of the Giza necropolis, although ignored by Egyptologists, has been recognized by open­minded and intuitive researchers throughout history. The Hermetic Neoplatonists of Alexandria, for example, appear to have been acutely sensitive to the possibility of a 'message' and were quick to discern the strong astral qualities of the textual material and the monuments.7 The scholar Proclus (fifth century AD) also acknowledged that the Great Pyramid was astronomically designed - and with certain specific stars in mind. Indeed, in his commentary on Plato's Timaeus (which deals with the story of the lost civilization of 'Atlantis'), Proclus reported strangely that 'the Great Pyramid was used as an observation for Sirius'.8

Vague memories of an astronomically constructed 'message' at Giza appear to have filtered down to the Middle Ages. At any rate the Arab chroniclers in this period spoke of the Great Pyramid as 'a temple to the stars' and frequently connected it to the Biblical 'Flood' which they dated to circa 10,300 BC, 9 Also of relevance is a report written by the Arab geographer Yakut al Hamawi (eleventh century AD) to the effect that the star-worshippers of Harran, the Sabians (whose 'holy books' were supposedly the writings of'Thoth-Hermes) came at that time on special pilgrimages to the Pyramids at Giza. 10 It /Page 257/ has also been pointed out that the very name of the Sabians - in Arabic Sa 'Ba - almost certainly derived from the ancient Egyptian word for star, i.e. Sba. 11 And the reader will recall from Part I that as far back as the early second millennium BC - i.e. almost three thousand years before Yakut al Hamawi left us his report connecting the Sabians to the Pyramids - pilgrims from Harran are known to have visited the Sphinx which they worshipped as a god under the name Hwl.12

In the seventeenth century, the British mathematician Sir Isaac Newton became deeply interested in the Great Pyramid and wrote a dissertation on its mathematical and geodetic qualities based on data that had been gathered at Giza by Dr John Greaves, the Savillian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford.13 Later, in 1865 the Astronomer Royal of Scotland, Charles Piazzi Smyth, launched an investigation into the Great Pyramid which he was convinced was an instrument of prophecy that incorporated a Messianic 'message'. It was Piazzi Smyth who first accurately measured and demonstrated the intense polar and meridional alignments of the monument, the precision of which he assigned to sightings of the ancient Pole star, Alpha Draconis.14

In the first half of the twentieth century, a succession of eminent astronomers - such as Richard Proctor, Eugene Antoniadi, Jean Baptiste Biot and Norman Lockyer .. made persistent attempts to draw attention to the astronomical qualities of the Giza monuments. Their efforts, however, had little impact on professional Egyptologists who by this time felt that they had got the whole intellectual business of the necropolis 'wrapped up' (it was a cemetery), did not understand astronomy at all (and claimed that the ancient Egyptians didn't either), and routinely ganged up to debunk, deride or simply ignore any astronomical 'theories' which diverged from their consensus.

Despite this hostile intellectual climate, we are of the opinion at the end of our own research that the big question is no longer whether the monuments of Giza were designed to express key astronomical and mathematical principles, but why.

THE GREAT PYRAMID OF GIZA

Y RAM MARY O MARY Y RAM

THE GREAT PMARYID OF GIZA

Y RAM MARY O MARY Y RAM

THE GREAT PYRAMID OF GIZA

......

THE

CHRISTOS

THE SELF CRUCIFIXION OF THE CRUCIFIXION OF THE SELF

DAVIDE 72 DAVIDE

MAY 21 1939 21 MAY

HAPPY BIRTH DAY = 9 DAVIDE 9 = HAPPY BIRTH DAY

21ST MAY 2011

THE CYCLE OF THE CIRCLE IS CLOSED NOW CLOSED IS THE CIRCLE OF THE CYCLE

FRATERNAL GREETINGS UNIVERSAL CITIZENS OF ETERNAL MIND

I AM THAT I AM

..........

I THANK THE ANKH THE ANKH I THANK