Alizzed again darkens the door of that word.

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"Heliopolis (City of the Sun) was referred to in the Bible as On but was originally known in the Egyptian language as Innu, or Innu Mehret- - meaning 'the pillar' or 'the northern pillar'. 3 It was a district of immense sanctity, associated with a strange group of nine solar and stellar deities, and was old beyond reckoning when Senuseret chose it as the site for his obelisk. Indeed, together with Giza (and the distant southern city of Abydos) Innu / Heliopolis was believed to have been part of the first land that emerged from the primeval waters at the

/ Page 382 /

moment of creation, the land of the 'First Time', where the gods had commenced their rule on earth.4
Heliopolitan theology rested on a creation-myth distinguished by a number of unique and curious features. It taught that in the beginning the universe had been filled with a dark, watery nothingness, called the Nun. Out of this inert cosmic ocean ( described as ' shapeless, black with the blackness of the blackest night' ) rose a mound of dry land on which Ra, the Sun God, materialized in his self created form as Atum ( sometimes depicted as an old bearded man leaning on a staff ): 5

I = 9th number of the magikalphabet. . . R =18 . . .A = 1 . . . A = 1 . . .T = 20. . .U = 21 . . . M = 13
 The Alizzed then had that scribe add to reduce, reduce to deduce

Page 809

8 x 9 + 72
         7 + 2 = 9

Chapter 33 Verse 3 x 33 = 99

Page 381

"Conscious of being alone, this blessed and immortal being contrived to create two divine offspring, Shu, god of the air and dryness, and Tefnut the goddess of moisture: ' I thrust my phallus into my closed hand. Imade my seed to enter my hand. Ipoured it into my own mouth. I evacuated under the form of Shu, I passed water under the form of Tefnut.' 7
Despite such apparently inauspicious beginnings, Shu and Tefnut (who were always described as 'Twins' and frequently depicted as lions) grew to maturity, copulated and produced offspring of their own: Geb the god of the earth and Nut, the goddess of the sky. These two also mated, creating Osiris and Isis, Set and Nepthys, and so completed the Ennead, the full company of the Nine Gods of Heliopolis. Of the nine, Ra, Shu, Geb and Osiris were said to have ruled in Egypt as Kings, followed by Horus, and lastly - for 3226 years - by the Ibis-headed wisdom god Thoth.8"

 Here, az if a being out of kilter, the Alizzed magiked up the magic names of Osiris, Iris, and Set, who then multiplied a truth.

The far yonder scribe again watched in some amaze the Zed Ali Zed, in swift repeat scatter the nine numbers amongst the letters of their progress. At the throw of the ninth arm when in conjunction set, the far yonder scribe made record of the fall

Page 71

Page 273 / 274

 
Page 421 /

I walked on into the deeper darkness, eventually finding my way to the Gallery of Kings. It led off from the eastern edge of the inner Hypostyle Hall about 200 feet from the entrance to the temple.
To pass through the gallery was to pass through time itself. On the wall to my left was a list of 120 of the gods of Ancient Egypt, together

/ Page 422 /

with the names of their principal sanctuaries. On my right, covering an area of perhaps ten feet by six feet, were the names of the 76 pharaohs who had preceded Seti1 to the throne: each name was carved in hieroglyphs inside an oval cartouche.
This tableau was known as the 'Abydos King List'. Glowing with colours of molten gold, it was designed to be read from left to right and was divided into five vertical and three horizontal registers it covered a grand expanse of almost 1700 years, beginning around 3000 BC with the reign of Menes, first king of the first dynasty, and ending with Seti's own reign around 1300BC. At the extreme left stood two figures exquisitely carved in high relief: Seti and his young son, the future Ramesses II.

 Belonging to the same class of historical documents as the Turin Papyrus and the Palermo Stone, the list spoke eloqently of the continuity of tradition. An inherant part of that tradition, was the belief or memory of a First, Time long, long ago, when the gods had ruled in Egypt. Principal among these gods was Osiris, and it was therefore appropriate that the Gallery of the Kings should provide access to a second corridor, leading to the rear of the temple where a marvellous building was located - one associated with Osiris from the beginning of written records in Egypt 9 and described by the Greek geographer Strabo (who visited Abydos in the first century BC) as ' . . . a remarkable structure built of solid stone {containing} a spring which lies at a great depth, so that one descends to it down vaulted galleries made of monoliths of surpassing size and workmanship There is a canal leading to the place from the great river . . .' 10
A few hundred years after Strabo's visit when the religion of Ancient Egypt had been supplanted by the new cult of Christianity, the silt of the river and the sands of the desert began to drift into the Osireion, filling it foot by foot, century by century by century, until its upright monoliths and huge lintels were buried and forgotten. And so it remained, out of sight and out of mind, until the beginning of the twentieth century, when the archeologists Flinders Petrie and Margaret Murray began excavations. In their 1903 season of digging

/ Page 423 /

they uncovered parts of a hall and passageway, lying in the desert about 200 feet south-west of the Seti I Temple and built in the recognizable architectural style of the Nineteenth Dynasty. However sandwiched between these remains and the rear of the Temple, they found unmistakeable signs that 'a large underground building' lay concealed.11 'This hypogeum', wrote Margaret Murray, appears to Professor Petrie to be the place that Strabo mentions,usually called Strabo's Well.12 This was good guesswork on the part of Petrie and Murray. Shortage of cash, however, meant that their theory of a buried building was not tested until the digging season of 1912-13. Then, under the direction of Professor Naville of the Egypt Exploration Fund, a long transverse chamber was cleared, at the end of which, to the north-east, was found a massive stone gateway made up of cyclopean blocks of granite and sandstone.
The next season, 1913 - 14, Naville and his team returned with 600 local helpers and diligently cleared the whole of the huge underground building:
What we discovered [Naville wrote] is a gigantic construction of about 100 feet in length and 60 in width, built with the most enormous stones that may be seen in Egypt. In the four sides of the enclosure walls are cells, 17 in number, of the height of a man and without ornamentation of any kind. The building itself is divided into three naves, the middle one being wider than those of the sides; the division is produced by two collonades made of huge granite monoliths supporting architraves of equal size.13
Naville commented with some astonishment on one block he measured in the corner of the building's northern nave, a block more than twenty - five feet long.14 Equally suprising was the fact that the cells cut into the enclosure walls had no floors, but turned out, as the excavations went deeper, to be filled with increasingly moist sand and earth:
The cells are connected by a narrow ledge between two and three feet wide; there is a ledge also on the opposite side of the nave, but no floor at all, and in digging to a depth of 12 feet we reached infilterated water. Even below the great gateway there is no floor, and when there was water in front of it the cells were probably reached with a small boat.15

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Water, water, everywhere - this seemed to be the theme of the Osireion, which lay at the bottom of the huge crater Naville and his men had excavated in 1914. It was positioned some 50 feet below the level of the floor of the Seti I Temple, almost flush with the water-table, and was approached by a modern stairway curving down to the south-east. Having descended this stairway, I passed under the hulking lintel slabs of the great gateway Naville (and Strabo) had described and crossed a narrow footbridge - again modern- which brought me to a large sandstone plinth.
Measuring about 80 feet in length by 40 in width, this plinth was composed of enormous paving blocks and was entirely surrounded by water. Two pools, one rectanular and the other square, had been cut into the plinth along the centre of its long axis and at either end stairways led down to a depth of about 12 feet below the water level. The plinth also supported the two massive colonnades Naville mentioned in his report, each of which consisted of five chunky rose - coloured granite monoliths about eight feet square by 12 feet high and weighing, on average, around 100 tons.16 The tops of these huge columns were spanned by granite lintels and there was evidence that the whole building had once been roofed over with a series of even larger monolithic slabs.17
To get a proper understanding of the structure of the Osireion, I found it helpful to raise myself directly above it in my mind's eye, so that I could look down on it. This exercise was assisted by the absence of the original roof which made it easier to envisage the whole edifice in plan. Also helpful was the fact that water had now seeped up to fill all of the building's pools, cells and channels to a depth of a few inches below the lip of the central plinth, as the original designers had apparently intended it should.18
Looking down in this manner, it was immediately apparent that the plinth formed a rectangular island, surrounded on all four sides by a water-filled moat about 10feet wide. The moat was contained by an immense, rectangular enclosure wall, no less than 20 feet thick,19 made of very large blocks of red sandstone disposed in polygonal jigsaw puzzle patterns. Into the huge thickness of this wall were set the 17 cells mentioned in Naville's report. Six lay to the east, six to the west,

/ Page 426 /

two to the south and three to the north. Off the central of the three northern cells lay a long transverse chamber, roofed with and composed of limestone. A similar transverse chamber also of limestone but no longer with an intact roof, lay immediately south of the great gateway. Finally, the whole structure was enclosed within an outer wall of limestone, thus completing a sequence of inter-nested rectangles, i.e., from the outside in, wall, wall moat plinth.
Another notable and outstandingly unusual feature of the Osireion was that it was not even approximately aligned to the cardinal points. Instead, like the way of the dead at Teotihuacan in Mexico, it was oriented to the east of due north. Since Ancient Egypt had been a civilization that could and normally did achieve precise alignments for its buildings, it seemed to me improbable that this apparently skewed orientation was accidental. Moreover, although 50 feet higher the Seti I temple was oriented along exactly the same axis - and again not by accident. The question was: which was the older building? Had the axis of the Osireion been predetermined by axis of the Temple or vice versa? This it turned out, was an issue over which considerable controversy, now long forgotten, had once raged. In a debate which had many connections with that surrounding the Sphinx and the Valley Temple at Giza, eminent archeologists had initially argued that the Osireion was a building of truly immense antiquity, a view expressed by Professor Naville in the London Times of 17 March 1914:
This monument raises several important questions. As to its date, its great similarity with the Temple of the Sphinx {as the Valley Temple was then known] shows it to be of the same epoch when building was made with enormous stones without any ornament. This is character-istic of the oldest architecture in Egypt. I should even say that we may call it the most ancient stone building in Egypt.20
Describing himself as overawed by the 'grandeur and stern simplicity' of the monument's central hall, with its remarkable granite monoliths, and by 'the power of those ancients who could bring from a distance and move such gigantic blocks', Naville made a suggestion concerning the function the Osireion might originally have been intended to serve: 'Evidently this huge construction was a large reservoir where water was stored during the high nile . . . It is curious that what we may consider as a beginning in architecture is neither a temple nor a tomb, but a gigantic pool, a waterwork . . . 21"
"In ...1914 it was 'the most ancient stone building in Egypt'. . ."

/ Page 429 / 430 /

" As Naville observed, the Osireion's similarity to the Valley Temple at Giza ' showed it to be of the same epoch when building was / made with enormous stones'. Likewise, until the end of her life, Margaret Murray remained convinced that the Osireion was not a cenotaph at all (least of all Seti's) She said,
It was made for the celebration of the mysteries of Osiris, and so far is unique among all the surviving buildings of Egypt. It is clearly early, for the great blocks of which it is built are of the style of the Old Kingdom; the simplicity of the actual building also points to it being of that early date.. . ."
"...Apart from the Valley Temple and other cyclopean edifices on the Giza Plateau, no other building remotely resembling the Osireion is known from any other epoch of Egypt's long history. This handful of supposedly Old Kingdom structures, built out of giant megaliths, seem to belong in a unique category. They resemble one another much more than they resemble any other known style of architecture and in all cases there are question-marks over their identity.
  Isn't this precisely what one would expect of buildings not erected by any historical pharaoh but dating back to prehistoric times? Doesn't it make sense of the mysterious way in which the Sphinx and the Valley Temple, and now the Osireion as well, seem to have become vaguely connected with the names of particular pharaohs ( Khafre and Seti I ), without ever yielding a single piece of evidence that clearly and unequivocally proves those pharaohs built the structures concerned? "

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 The overwhelming message of a large number of Central American legends is that the Fourth Age of the world ended very badly. A catastrophic deluge was followed by a long period during which the light of the sun vanished from the sky and the air was filled with a tenebrous darkness. Then:
The gods gathered together at Teotihuacan ['the place of the gods'] and wondered anxiously who was to be the next sun. Only the sacred fire [ the material representation of Huehueteotl, the god who gave life its beginning] could be seen in the darkness, still quaking following the recent chaos. Someone will have to sacrifice himself, throw himself into the fire,' they cried, ' only then will there be a Sun.'1
A drama ensued in which two deities ( Nanahuatzin and Tecciztecatl ) immolated themselves for the common good. One burned quickly in the centre of the sacred fire; the other roasted slowly on the chambers at its edge 'The gods waited for a long time eventually the sky started to glow red as a at dawn. In the east appeared the great sphere the sun, life-giving and incandescent . . .'2
It was at this moment of cosmic rebirth that Quetzalcoatl manifested himself. His mission was with humanity of the Fifth age. He therefore took the form of a human being - a bearded white man, just like Viracocha.
In the Andes, Viracocha's capital was Tiahuanaco. In Central

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Quetzalcoatl's was the supposed birth-place of the Fifth, Teotihuacan, the city of the gods.3

Teotihuacan, 50 kilometres north -east of Mexico City
I stood in the airy enclosure of the Citadel and looked north across the morning haze towards the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon. Set amid grey-green scrub country, and ringed by distant mountains, these two great monuments played their parts in a symphony of ruins strung out along the axis of the so-called 'Street of the Dead'. The citadel lay at the approximate mid point of this wide avenue which ran perfectly straight for more than four kilometres. The Pyramid of the Moon was at its northern extreme, The pyramid of the Sun offset somewhat to its east.
In the context of such a geometric site, an exact north-south or east-west orientation might have been expected. It was Therefore surprising that the architects who had planned Teotihuacan had deliberately chosen to incline the Street of the Dead 15 " degrees "30 "minutes "east of north. There were several theories as to why this eccentric orientation had been selected, but none was especially convincing. Growing numbers of scholars, however, were beginning to wonder whether astronomical alignments might have been involved. One, for example, had proposed that the Street of the Dead might have bee'built to face the setting of the Pleiades at the time it was constructed4 Another Professor Gerald Hawkins, had suggested that a 'Sirius- Pleides axis' could have played a part. 5 And Stansbury Hagar (secretary of the Department of Ethnology at the Brooklyn Institute of the Arts and Sciences), had suggested that the street might represent the Milky Way.6
Indeed Hagar went further than this, seeing the portrayal of specific planets and stars in many of the pyramids, mounds and other structures that hovered like fixed satellites around the axis of the Street of the Dead. His complete thesis was that Teotihuacan had been designed as a kind of 'map of heaven': ' It reproduced on earth a supposed celestial plan of the sky-world where dwelt the deities and spirits of the dead. '7

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During the 1960s and 1970sHagar's intuitions were tested in the field by Hugh Hartleston Jr, an American engineer resident in Mexico, who carried out a comprehensive mathematical survey at Teotihua-can Harleston reported his findings in October 1974 at the International Congress of Americanists.8 His paper, which was full of daring and innovative ideas, contained some particularly curious information about the Citadel and about the Temple of Quetzalcoatl located at the eastern extreme of this great square compound.
The Temple was regarded by scholars as one of the best-preserved archaeological monuments in Central America. 9 This was because the original, prehistoric structure had been partially buried beneath another much later mound immediately in front of it to the west. Excavation of that mound had revealed the elegant six-stage pyramid that now confronted me. It stood 72 feet high and its base covered an area of 82000 square feet.
Still bearing traces of the original multicoloured paints which had coated it in antiquity, the exposed Temple was a beautiful and strange sight. The predominant sculptural motif was a series of huge serpent heads protruding three-dimensionally out of the facing blocks and lining the sides of the massive central stairway. The elongated jaws of these oddly humanoid reptiles were heavily endowed with fangs, and the upper lips with a sort of handlebar moustache. Each serpent's thick neck was ringed by an elaborate plume of feathers - the unmistakable symbol of Quetzalcoatl.10
What Harleston's investigations had shown was that a complete mathematical relationship appeared to exist among the principal structures lined up along the Street of the Dead (and indeed beyond it ) This relationship suggested something extraordinary, namely that Teotihuacan might originally have been designed as a precise scale- model of the solar system. At any rate, if the centre line of the Temple of Quetzalcoatl were taken as denoting the position of the sun, markers laid out northwards from it along the axis of the Street of the Dead seemed to indicate the correct orbital distances of the inner planets, the asteroid belt, Jupiter, Saturn (represented by the so-called 'Sun' Pyramid), Uranus (by the 'Moon' Pyramid), and Neptune and Pluto, by as yet unexcavated mounds some kilometres farther north.11

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If these correlations were more than coincidental, then, at the very least, they indicated the presence at Teotihuacan of an advanced observational astronomy, one not surpassed by modern science until a relatively late date. Uranus remained unknown to our own astrono-mers until 1787, Neptune until 1846 and Pluto until 1930. Even the most conservative estimate of Teotihuacan's antiquity, by contrast, suggested that the principal ingrediants of the site-plan (including the Citadel, the Street of the Dead and the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon) must date back at least to the time of Christ.12 No known civilization of that epoch, either in the Old World or in the New, is supposed to have had any knowledge at all of the outer planets - let alone to have possessed accurate information concerning their orbital distances from each other and from the sun.

After completing his studies of the pyramids and avenues of Teotihuacan, Stasbury Hagar concluded: 'We have not yet realized either the importance or the refinement, or the widespread distribu-tion throughout ancient America, of the astronomical cult of which the celestial plan was a feature, and of which Teotihuacan was one of the principal centres. '13
But was this just an astronomical 'cult'? Or was it something approximating more closely to what we might call a science? And whether cult or science, was it realistic to suppose that it had enjoyed 'widespread distribution' only in the Americas when there was so much evidence liking it to other parts of the ancient world?
For example, archaeo-astronomers making use of the latest star-mapping computer programmes had recently demonstrated that the three world-famous pyramids on Egypt's Giza plateau formed an exact terrestrial diagram of the three belt stars in the constellation of Orion.14 Nor was this the limit of the celestial map the Ancient Egyptian priests had created in the sands on the west bank of the Nile. Included in their overall vision, as we shall see in Parts VI and VII, there was a natural feature - the river Nile- which was exactly where it should be had it been designed to represent the Milky Way.15
The incorporation of a 'celestial plan' into key sites in Egypt and

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Mexico did not by any means exclude religious functions. On the contrary, whatever else they may have been intended for it is certain that the monuments of Teotihuacan, like those of the Giza plateau, played important religious roles in the lives of the communities they served.
Thus Central American traditions collected in the sixteenth century by Father Bernardino de Sahagun gave eloquent expression to a widespread belief that Teotihuacan had fulfilled at least one specific and important religious function in ancient times. According to these legends the City of the Gods was so known because 'the Lords therein buried, after their deaths, did not perish but turned into gods. . . '16 In other words, it was 'the place where men became gods'17 It was additionally known as the place of those who had the road of the gods',18 and 'the place where gods were made'.19
Was it a coincidence, I wondered, that this seemed to have been the religios purpose of the three pyramids at Giza ? The archaic hieroglyphs of the Pyramid Texts, the oldest coherent body of writing in the world, left little room for doubt that the ultimate objective of the rituals carried out within those colossal structures was to bring about the deceased pharaoh's transfigeration - to throw open the doors of the firmament and to make a road' so that he might 'ascend into the company of the Gods'20
The notion of pyramids as devices designed (presumably in some metaphysical sense) 'to turn men into gods' was, it seemed to me, too idiosyncratic and peculiar to have been arrived at independently in both Ancient Egypt and Mexico. So, too, was the idea of using the layout of sacred sites to incorprate a celestial plan.
Moreover, there were other strange similarities that deserved to be considered.
Just as at Giza, three principal pyramids had been built at Teotihuacan: the Pyramid / Temple of Quetzalcoatl, the Pyramid of theSun and the Pyramid of the moon. Just as at Giza, the site plan was not symetrical, as one might have expected, but involved two structures in direct alignment with each other while the third appeared to have been deliberately offset to one side. Finally at Giza, the summits of the Great Pyramid and the Pyramid of Cephren were level, even though the former was taller building than the latter.

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Likewise, at Teotihuacan, the summits of the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon were level even though the former was taller. The reason was the same in both cases: the Great Pyramid was built on lower ground than the Pyramid of Cephren, and the Pyramid of the Sun on lower ground than the Pyramid of the Moon. 21
Could all this be coincidence? Was it not more logical to conclude that there was an ancient connection between Mexico and Egypt?
  For reasons I have outlined in Chapters Eighteen and Nineteen I doubted whether any direct, causal link was involved - at any rate within historic times. Once again, however, as with the Mayan calendar, and as with the early maps of Antartica, was it not worth keeping an open mind to the possibility that we might be dealing with legacy: that the pyramids of Egypt and the ruins of Teotihuacan migh express the technology, the geographical knowledge, the observational astronomy (and perhaps also the religion ) of a forgotten civilisation of the past which had once, as the Popol Vuh claimed, 'examined the four corners, the four points of the arch of the sky, and the round face of the earth'?
  There was widespread agreement among academics concerning the antiquity of the Giza pyramids, thought to be about 4500 years old.22 No such unanimity existed with regard to Teotihuacan. Neither the Street of the Dead, nor the Temple of Quetzalcoatl,nor the pyramids of the Sun and the Moon had ever been definitively dated.23 The majority of scholars believed that the city had flourished between 100 BC and AD 600, but others argued strongly that it must have risen to prominence much earlier, between 1500 and 1000BC. There were others still who sought, largely on geological grounds, to push the foundation date back to 4000 BC before the eruption of the nearby volcano Xitli.24
Amid all this uncertainty about the age of Teotihuacan, I had not been surprised to discover that no one had the faintest idea of the
identity of those who had actually built the largest and most remarkable metropolis ever to have existed in the pre-Columbian New World. 25 All that could be said for sure was this: when the Aztecs, on their march to imperial power, first stumbled upon the mysterious city in the twelfth century AD, its colossal edifices and avenues were already old beyond imagining and so densely overgrown

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that they seemed more like natural features than works of man. 26 Attached to them, however, was a thread of local legend, passed down from generation to generation, which asserted that they had been built by giants27 and that their purpose had been to transform men into gods."
"... We have already considered the possibility that the Way of the Dead may have served as a terrestrial counterpart of the Milky Way. Of interest in this regard is the work of another American, Alfred E. Schlemmer, who- like Hugh Harleston Jr - was an engineer Schlemmer's field was technological forecasting, with specific refer-ence to the prediction of earthwakes,31 on which he presented a paper

/ Page 185 /

at the Eleventh National Convention of Chemical Engineers (in Mexico City in October 1971).
Schlemmers argument was that the Street of the Dead might never have been a street at all. Instead, it might originally have been laid out as a row of linked reflecting pools, filled with water which had descended through a series of locks from the Pyramid of the Moon, at the northern extreme, to the citadel in the south.
As I walked steadily north wards towards the still-distant Moon Pyramid, it seemed to me that this theory had several points in its favour. For a start the 'Street' was blocked at regular intervals by high partition walls, at the foot of which the remains of well made sluices could clearly be seen. Moreover, the lie of the land would have facilated a north-south hydraulic flow since the base of the Moon Pyramid stood on ground that was approximately 100 feet higher than the area in front of the citadel. The partioned sections could easily have been filled with water and might indeed have served as reflecting pools.." "..Finally, the Teotihuacan Mapping Project (financed by the National Science Foundation in Washington DC and led by Professor Rene Millon of the University of Rochester) had demonstrated conclusively that the ancient city had possessed'many carefully laid-out canals and systems of branching waterways, artificially dredged into straightened portions of a river, which formed a network within Teotihuacan and ran all the way to [Lake Texcoco], now ten miles distant but perhaps closer in antiquity' . 32
There was much argument about what this vast hydraulic system had been designed to do. Schlemmers contention was that the particular waterway he had identified had been built to serve a pragmatic purpose as a 'long-range seismic monitor'-part of 'an ancient science, no longer understood'. He painted out that remote earthquakes 'can cause standing waves to form on a liquid surface right across the planet' and suggested that the carefully graded and spaced reflecting pools of the Street of the Dead might have been designed 'to enable Teotihuacanos to read from the standing waves formed there the location and strength of earthquakes around the

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globe, thus allowing them to predict such an occurrences in their own area'.34
There was, of course, no proof of Sclemmer's theory. However, when I remembered the fixation with earthquakes and floods apparent everywhere in Mexican mythology, and the equally obessive concern with forecasting future events evident in the Maya calendar, I felt less inclined to dismiss the apparently far-fetched conclusions of the American engineer. If Schlemmer were right, if the ancient Teotihu-canos had indeed understood the principles of resonant vibration and had put them into practice in seismic forecasting, the implication was that they were the possessors of an advanced science. And if people like Hagar and Harleston were right - if, for example, a scale-model of the solar system had also been built into the basic geometry of Teotihuacan - this too suggested that the city was founded by a scientifically evolved civilization not yet identified.
I continued to walk northwards along the Street of the Dead and turned east towards the Pyramid of the Sun. Before reaching this great monument, however, Ipaused to examine a ruined patio, the principal feature of which was an ancient 'temple' which concealed a perplexing mystery beneath its rock floor.

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  Some archaeological discoveries are heralded with much fanfare; others, for various reasons, are not. Among this latter category must be included the thick and extensive layer of sheet mica found sandwiched between two of the upper levels of the Teotihuacan Pyramid of the Sun when it was probed for restoration in 1906. The lack of interest which greeted this discovery, and the absence of any follow-up studies to determine its possible function is quite understandable because the mica, which had a considerable commer-cial value was removed and sold as soon as it had been excavated..."
"...There had also been a much more recent discovery of mica at Teotihuacan(in the 'Mica Temple')  and this too has passed almost without notice. Here the reason is harder to explain because there has been no looting and the mica remains on site.2
One of a group of buildings, the Mica Temple is situated around a patio about 1000 feet south of the west face of the Pyramid of the Sun. Directly under a floor paved with heavy rock slabs, archeologists financed by the Viking Foundation excavated two massive sheets of mica which had been carefully and purposeively installed at some extremely remote date by a people who must have been skilled in

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cutting and handling this material. The sheets are ninety feet square and form two layers. one laid directly on top of the other.3
 
The scribe, now knowing the score, noted carefully the page number, then taking a word or two, divided, multipled, and in addition, noted, that 'ninety feet square' revealed the following, namely, That 90 divided by 12 iz 7.5. That 90 x 90 iz 8100. That 90 + 90 iz 180 and that 90 x 90 x 2 iz 16200 that divided by two iz 1800 and that 1 + 8 iz 9. THAT iz THAT said Zed Aliz Zed. And so it was.
After such pause for quick breath, Brother Graham again put pen to paper, the line of which, yon scribe dutifully copied,word for word.
Page 1 + 8 + 9 = 18 1 + 8 = 9 1 x 8 x 9 = 72 7 + 2 = 9
" Mica is a not a uniform substance substance but contains trace elements of different metals depending on the kind of rock formation in which it is found. Typically these metals include potassium and aluminium and also, in varying quantities, ferrous and ferric iron, magnesium, lithium, manganese and titanium. The trace elements in Teotihua-can's Mica Temple indicate that the underfloor sheets belong to a type which occurs only in Brazil, some 2000 miles away.4 Clearly, therefore the builders of the Temple must have had a specific need for this particular kind of mica and were prepared to go to considerable lengths to obtain it, otherwise they could have used the locally available variety more cheaply and simply.
Mica does not leap to mind as an obvious general-purpose flooring material. Its use to form layers underneath a floor, and thus completely out of sight, seems especially, bizarre when we remember that no other ancient structure in the Americas, or anywhere else in the world, has been found to contain a feature like this.5
It is frustrating that we will never be able to establish the exact position, let alone the purpose, of the large sheet that Bartres excavated and removed from the Pyramid of the Sun in 1906. The two intact layers in the Mica Temple, on the other hand, resting as they do in a place where they had no decorative function, look as though they were designed to do a particular job. Let us note in passing that mica posesses characteristics which suit it especially well for a range of technological applications. In modern industry, it is used in the construction of capacitors and is valued as a thermal and electric insulator. It is also opaque to fast neutrons and can act as a moderator in nuclear reactions.
The scribe inserts a swift return from the come day go day record.

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1 x 8 x 9 = 72 " The Sun and the Moon and the way of the Dead
Pyramid of the Sun, Teotihuacan,
  Having climbed more than 200 feet up a series of flights of stone stairs I reached the summit and looked towards the zenith. It was midday 19 May, and the sun was directly overhead, and the sun was directly overhead, as it would be again on 25

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July. On these two dates, and not by accident, the west face of the pyramid was oriented precisely to the position of the setting sun. 6
  "A more curious but equally deliberate effect could be observed on the equinoxes. 20 March and 22 September. Then the passage of the sun's rays from south to north resulted at noon in the progressive obliteration of a perfectly straight shadow that ran along one of the lower stages of the western facade. The whole process, from complete shadow to complete illumination, took exactly 66.6 seconds. It had done so without fail, year - in year - out, ever since the pyramid had been built and would continue to do so until the giant edifice crumbled into dust. 7
What this meant of course, was that at least one of the many functions of the pyramid had been to serve as a 'perennial clock', precisely signalling the equinoxes and thus facilating calendar corrections as and when necessary for a people apparently obsessed, like the Maya, with the elapse and measuring of time. Another implication was that the master - builders of Teotihuacan must have possessed an enormouse body of astronomic and geodetic data and refferred to this data to set the Sun Pyramid at the precise orientation necessary to achieve the desired equinoctial effects."

 Page 75

"The early Spanish travellers who visited the ruined Bolivian city of Tiahuanaco at around the time of the conquest were impressed by the sheer size of its buildings and by the atmosphere of mystery that clung to them. 'I asked the natives whether these edifices were built in the time of the Inca,' wrote the chronicler Pedro Cieza de Leon, 'They laughed at the question, affirming that they were made long before the Incas reign and . . . that they had heard from their forbears that everything to be seen there appeared suddenly in the course of a single night . . . '1 Meanwhile another Spanish visitor of the same period recorded a tradition which said that the stones had been lifted miraculously off the ground, 'They were carried through the air to the the sound of a trumpet.'2
Not long after the conquest a detailed decription of the city was written by the historian Garcilaso de la Vega.. No looting for treasure or for building materials had yet taken place and, though ravaged by the tooth of time, the site was still magnificent enough to take his breath away:
We must now say something about the large and almost incredible buildings of Tiahuanaco. There is an artificial hill, of great height, built on stone foundations so that the earth will not slide. There are gigantic figures carved in stone . . . these are much worn which shows there great antiquity. There are walls, the stones of which are so enormous it is difficult to imagine what human force could have put

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them in place. And there are the remains of strange buildings, the most remarkable being stone portals, hewn out of solid rock; these stand on bases anything up to 30 feet long, 15 feet wide and 6 feet thick, base and portal being all of one piece . . . How, and with the use of what tools or implements, massive works of such size could be achieved are questions which we are unable to answer . . . Nor can it be imagined how such enormous stones could have been brought here . . .3
That was in the sixteenth century. more than 400 years later, at the end of the twentieth century, I shared Garcilaso's puzzlement Scattered around Tiahuanaco, in defiance of the looters who had robbed the site of so much in recent years were monoliths so big and cumbersome yet so well cut that they almost seemed to be the work of super-beings.

Like a disciple at the feet of his master, I sat on the floor of the sunken temple and looked up at the enigmatic face which all the scholars of Tiahuanaco believed was intended to represent Viracocha. Untold centuries ago, unknown hands had carved this likeness into a tall pillar of red rock. Though much eroded, it was the likeness of a man of power . . .
He had a high forehead, and large, round eyes. His nose was straight, narrow at the bridge flaring towards the nostrils. His lips were full. His distinguishing feature, however, was his stylish and imposing beard, which had the effect of making his face broader at the jaws than at the temples. looking more closely, I could see that the sculptor had portrayed a man whose skin was shaved all around his lips with the result that his moustache began high on his cheeks, roughly parallel with the end of his nose. From there it curved extravagantly down beside the corners of his mouth, forming an exaggerated goatee at the chin, and then followed his jawline back to his ears. Above and below the ears, on the side of the head, were carved odd representations of animals. Or perhaps it would be better to describe

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these carvings as representations of odd animals, because they looked like big, clumsy, prehistoric mammals with fat tails and club feet.
There were other points of interest. For example, the stone figure of Viracocha had been sculpted with the hands and arms folded, one below the other, over the front of a long, flowing robe. On each side of this robe appeared the sinuous form of a snake coiling upwards from ground to shoulder level. And as I looked at this beautiful design (the original of which had perhaps been embroidered on rich cloth) the picture that came into my mind was of Viracocha as a wizard or a sorcerer, a bearded, Merlin-like figure dressed in weird and wonderful clothes, calling down fire from heaven."

Page 66

"The name Merlin is supposed by some to be derived from that of the Celtic sky God Myrddin, which would link this ancient tradition of wizardry with the druids - the priests, doctors, and wise men of the Celts who were the inhabitants of Britain and France when the Romans came" 

Page 65

The Mystery of the Megaliths
"Megalithic Structures - that is to say, prehistoric monuments built with stones of enormous size - exist in many parts of the world. The most famous, if not the greatest number, are found in the British Isles and in Brittany in the north-west corner of France. They are of many different kinds - dolmens or cromlechs (tables of two or more uprights supporting a flat stone on top), chambered tombs, menhirs or great stones standing alone, stone rings of various sizes and shapes (circles, flattened circles, ellipses, and egg-shaped rings), and straight avenues of standing stones arranged like grids in multiple rows.
Of all the megalithic structures by far the best known and the best preserved is the circular 'temple' of Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain. We call it a temple because, in the words of the official guide, 'almost everyone agrees that Stonehenge was a temple',1 but we print the word in inverted commas because there is no evidence to prove that it was ever in regular use for religious worship, much less that it was originally designed for that purpose. What was the original purpose of the founders of Stonehenge is, in fact, the core of the mystery that we are here attempting to unravel.
From the point of view of sheer size and complexity of structure perhaps the most important of the megalithic sites is the great stone ring at Avebury on the Marlborough Downs about 16 miles (25 kilometres) to the north. This is the centre of a cluster of prehistoric stones and earthworks which include the neolithic camp of Windmill Hill, the 350-foot (107 metres) long West Kennet Long Barrow, and Silbury Hill, the biggest man-made mound in Europe with a height of 130 feet (40 metres) and a base covering more than 5 acres (2hectares)' 
Of the single megalithic stones by far the biggest is the great menhir of Er Grah (Le Grand Menhir Brise), which lies broken in three pieces on a peninsular in Quiberon Bay, South Brittany, not far from the 1000-yard long stone avenues of Carnac. This megalith once stood over 60 feet high and was clearly visible from 10 miles across the sea. It is estimated to weigh 340 tons. this is six or seven times the weight of the biggest of the huge sarsen stones of Stonehenge, which itself weighs 50 tons..." 
In medieval times it was believed, not unnaturally, that the erection of the great stones at Stonehenge and elsewhere was the work of magicians. There was no other possible explanation. In his Histories of the Kings of Britain written in the twelfth century, Geoffrey of Monmouth tells us that the stones of Stonehenge were brought to England from Ireland by the wizard Merlin to make a burial place for Britons who had been treacherously slain by the Saxon leader Hengist at a meeting to which he had invited them on Salisbury Plain. The British King Ambrosius Aurelianus (reputedly the brother of Uther Pedragon and uncle of King Arthur) wanted to build a memorial for the dead men which would last for ever, but his builders and masons could think of no way of doing this. So he sent for Mer-lin, the magician, who answered him thus:
' "If you want to grace the burial-place of these men with some lasting monument, send for the Giants' Ring which is on mount Killaraus in Ireland. In that place there is a stone construction which no man of this period could ever erect, unless he combined great skill and artistry. The stones are enormous and there is no one alive strong enough to move them. If they are placed in posi-tion round this site, in the way in which they are erected over there, they will stand forever." '2

Page 77

'These stones' (said Merlin) 'are connected with certain religious rites and they have various properties which are medicinally important. Many years ago the Giants transported them from the remotest confines of Africa and set them up in Ireland at a time when they inhabited that country. Their plan was that, whenever they felt ill, baths should be prepared at the foot of the stones: for they used to pour water over them and to run this water into baths in which their sick were cured. What is more, they mixed the water with herbal concoctions and so healed their wounds. There is not a single stone among them which hasn't some medicinal virtue.' "

Page 92

"Apollo, to whom the spherical temple of the Hyperboreans was dedicated, was not only a sun god: he was also a god of healing. Could there be a connection here between the famed good health of those people, the identity of the god they worshipped, and the magic medicinal properties of the stones of the Giants Ring which the wizard Merlin brought from Ireland in Geoffrey of Monmouth's tale? And could there also be a connection between the technical magic displayed in the erection of the stones and the worship of Apollo in his third capacity as god of technology and the arts?
The men whom King Aurelius sent to Ireland, according to Geoffrey, to fetch the stones had first to fight a battle with the Irish. He continues ..."

Page 20 /

" 'The Britons . . . made choice of Uther Pendragon the king's brother, with fifteen thousand men, to attend to this business.' The armada put to sea 'with a prosperous gale.' The irish heard of the proposed seizure of their monument, and king Gilloman raised a 'huge army,' vowing that the Britons should not 'carry off from us the very

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smallest stone of the Dance.' But the invaders 'fell upon them straightway at the double-quick . . . prevailed . . . pressed forward to mount Killaraus . . . '
Then the would-be monument-movers were faced with the problem of how to transport those great stones. ' They tried huge hawsers . . . ropes . . . scaling ladders [memories of the lists of weapons in Caesar's Gallic Wars!] . . .never a whit the forwarder . . .' Merlin had to take over. He burst out laughing and put together his own engines . . . laid the stones down so lightly as none would believe . . .bade carry them to the ships,' and they all 'returned unto Britain with joy' and there 'set them up about the compass of the burial-ground in such wise as they had stood . . . and proved yet once again how skill surpasseth strength.'
Geoffrey added that Uther Pendragon, and King, or Emperor Constantine, were both buried at Stonehenge.
Most of Geoffrey's story is useful only as entertainment but there are certain bits of it that merit consideration or if not consideration at least comment. ITEM:: Stonehenge was certainly not built to c ommemorate either Saxon or British dead - but it is interesting that the old legend so firmly links it with such a use, when it was only recently found to have been a place of burial. ITEM: Geoffrey said that its stones were of supreme 'virtue.' It is true that there was general reverence for the mystic powers of stones for a long time after the coming of Christ - in 452A.D. the Synod of Arles denounced those 'who venerate trees wells and stones' and such de-nouncement was repeated by Charlemange and others down to recent times - but modern discoveries, to be discussed later, have demonstrated the possibility that the stones of Stone-henge may have been regarded by their original erectors as of especially sovereign powers. Two stones were crucial in the legend of Arthur: the unknown lad became king by literally one twist of the wrist - he grasped that mysterious sword and lightly and fiercely pulled it out of the stone' -... " The S ' word again, intercepted Zed Aliz. " and then the only man, or being, who could have saved him became asotted and doted on one of the ladies of the lake. . . that height Nimue . . . and always Merlin lay about the lady to have her maidenhood, and she was ever passing weary of him,

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and would fain have been delivered of him, for she was afeard of him because he was a devil's son . . .and so on a time it happed that Merlin showed to her in a rock whereas was a great wonder . . . so by her subtle working she made Merlin to go under that stone to let her wit of the marvels there,but she wrote so there for him that he came never out for all the craft he could do and Merlin thus entombed beneath that stone - the fate of king and kingdom was sealed "

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"...It is interesting that in the legend Merlin did not resort to simple magic to whisk the stones from the old site to the new. He was of course more than capable of that: legendizers other than Geoffrey state that he transported the stones by his 'word of power' only. Could it be that there lurks folk-memory of actual moving of Merlin's 'engines'?
In the realm of purer myth, there may be more than engin-eering connection between Merlin and Stonehenge. Some mythographers have thought that the name 'Merlin' is a corruption of the name of the ancient Celtic sky god 'Myrddin,' who might have been worshipped at stone monuments. A Welsh triad states that the whole of Britain, before men came was called 'Clas Myrddin,' or 'Merlin's Enclosure.' The Welsh folklorist John Rhys in an 1886 Hibbert Lecture said, "I have come to the conclusion that we cannot do better than follow the story of Geoffrey, which makes Stonehenge the work of Merlin Emrys, commanded by another Emrys, which Iinterpret to mean that the temple belonged to the Celtic Zeus, whose later legendary self we have in Merlin.' In 1899

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Professor A.T. Evans wrote in the Archaeological Review that Stonehenge was an advanced representation of sepulchral architecture, ' where the cult or worship of departed ancestors may have become associated with the worship of the Celtic Zeus; the form under which the divinity was worshipped would have been that of his sacred oak.' "
 

Page 87

"Leaving the fish-garbed figures, I came at last to the Gateway of the Sun, located in the north-west comer of the Kalasasaya.
It proved to be a freestanding monolith of grey-green andesite about 12 1/2 feet wide, 10 feet high and 18 inches thick, weighing an estimated 10 tons.14 Perhaps best envisaged as a sort of Arc de Triomphe, though on a much smaller scale, it looked in this setting like a door connecting two invisible dimensions - a door between nowhere and nothing. The stonework was of exceptionally high quality and authorities agreed that it was 'one of the archaeological wonders of the Americas'.15 Its most enigmatic feature was the so- alled 'calendar frieze' carved into its eastern facade along the top of the portal.
At its centre, in an elevated position, this frieze was dominated by what scholars took to be another representation of Viracocha,16 but this time in his more terrifying aspect as the god-king who could call down fire from heaven. His gentle, fatherly side was still expressed: tears of compassion were running down his cheeks. But his face was set stem and hard, his tiara was regal and imposing, and in either hand he grasped a thunderbolt.17 In the interpretation given by Joseph Campbell, one of the twentieth century's best-known students of myth, 'The meaning is that the grace that pours into the universe

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through the sun door is the same as the energy of the bolt that annihilates and is itself indestructible. . .'18
I turned my head to right and left, slowly studying the remainder of the frieze. It was a beautifully balanced piece of sculpture with three rows of eight figures, twenty-four in all, lined up on either side of the elevated central image~ Many attempts, none of them particularly convincing, have been made to explain the assumed calendrical function of these figures.19 All that could really be said for sure was that they had a peculiar, bloodless, cartoon like quality, and that there was something coldly mathematical, almost machinelike, about the I way they seemed to march in regimented lines towards Viracocha."