INTRODUCTION

Every mystery solved brings us to the threshold of a greater one.

(Rachel Carson, 1987).

The spring sky was a soft grey as we stood in the hushed twilight of an Oxfordshire field in England. A robed figure approached from a hut rather like a Druid priest emerging from a sacred grove. He quietly introduced himself as Peter the Hermit, explaining he was the voluntary caretaker of this ancient sacred site, the Rollright Stone Circle (Figure 0.1).

The quietly spoken Peter told of a local legend in which the great stones forming the circle were called the King’s Men. At midnight, these megaliths are said to move down to drink at a spring in Little Rollright Spinney (Hadingham, 1976). Similar legends about moving megaliths are common in Europe and England at such sites as the Carnac alignment in Brittany, France (Figure 0.2) and the Drizzlecombe megaliths at Dartmouth (Figure 0.10).

As the sky slowly changed to indigo, we continued our conversation with Peter into the dusk. Suddenly, the atmosphere was broken by the arrival of a group of noisy visitors who started to run excitedly around the circle, counting the stones. When they returned to the hut, we asked them why they did this. The family from a nearby US Air Base explained that every night they repeated the ritual of stone-counting, and every night the count varied. This was part of the legend.

Although they were from the most technologically advanced country in the world, this family participated in an ‘other-world’ ritual. I found it interesting that they willingly suspended reason to accept a subtler, perhaps more naive, aspect to physical life than the ‘rationality’ of every-day existence.

Figure 0.1: The Rollright Stones megalithic circle, sacred site, Little Rollright, Chipping Norton,

Oxfordshire, England (Courtesy: © Diego Meozzi, stonepages.com).

Figure 0.2: Megalith alignment at Carnac, France. (Courtesy © Carlos Matos)

Megaliths similar to the Rollright Stone Circle are found throughout the world, and the giant stones of which they are comprised are in scale with people of immense size. Could the builders have been of gigantic stature? In Uriel’s Machine, Chris Knight and Peter Lomas (2001) contend that the body-size of the builders could have been in scale with the architectural elements they had to manipulate. (The subject of giants will be examined later.)

Legends about moving megaliths are common in Europe and England. Other megalithic examples, referred to as Cyclopean masonry, occur worldwide. Many, such as those at Cuzco in Peru (Figure 0.3) and the Valley Temple of Khufu at Giza in Egypt (Figures 0.5, 0.6), have joints between their huge ‘jig-saw’ stone blocks so accurate and fine that a thin blade cannot be inserted between them. This indicates that skills not commonly associated with so-called, primitive societies were achieved in prehistoric times. In the Peruvian examples, the Incas are supposed to have been the builders. However, the mystery deepens when one considers the enormous size of the stones. Hancock (1995) has suggested the builders could have been giants as legend relates. While seeking reasons for such mysteries, not only will the path of traditional knowledge be trodden here but it also will be necessary to venture into areas of esoteric knowledge when science falls short.

Figure 0.3: Cyclopaean masonry at Sacsahuayman, Cuzco, Mexico. (Courtesy: © T. Greer)

Many mysteries concerning the ancient past, particularly those relevant to this work, have their roots in the teachings of the ancient Mysteries. The ceremonies of these Mystery teachings utilised costume and drama with accompanying music, sounds and dramatic effects. They were usually divided into Lesser and Greater Mysteries. In the Lesser Mysteries, living the ‘good life’ was taught along with control of the physical body, lower emotions and of mundane thought. In some cases, the Greater Mysteries included teachings about the dying process, the arcane mystery of death, the afterlife and of reincarnation (Baggs & Baggs, 2003).

To clarify the use of the term ‘mysteries’, it is necessary to make a distinction between the extinct homo-phone, ‘misteries’ (Latin: ministerium=craft or guild) as in Free-masonry (Axelrod, 1997) and ‘mysteries’. Here, ‘the Mysteries’ refers to secret teachings given to qualified pupils. The other use of ‘mystery’ in the sense of ‘secret’, refers to a genuine puzzle.

In early Greek Classical times, the teachings in one of the Mysteries were conducted at the Pythagorean Academy. The Platonic Mystery schools followed later. In the current era (CE), the Neo-platonic philosophies continued the teachings. Their schools and Mystery teachings particularly focussed on the study of the principles of architecture, music and mathematics, as well as on the practice of philosophy and medicine. In this work, a journey is undertaken to reveal the secrets and symbols associated with art, architecture, music, mathe-matics, philosophy and landscape elements, along with the Mystery teachings. The journey will move from the most remote periods of prehistory, through historical times into the present.

In this work, ‘art’ is defined as ‘human creative skill or its application’ (Pearsall & Trumble, 1995) and includes sculpture, art-metalwork, painting and pottery. Ancient ‘architecture’, has been defined by Professor Renfrew (1975) as follows:

suddenly and decisively the impressive megalithic tombs of western Europe are set earlier than any comparable monuments in the world…This is not merely building: it is architecture [authors’ emphasis]…before the introduction of writing to Western Europe.

His definition will apply for structures and art (including petroglyphs) and for all periods on Timeline 1 (Figure 0.4).

For convenience, these categories are related to the conventional descriptions for the periods in Timeline 2.

Egyptian architecture such as the pyramid of Cheops (Figures 0.5, 0.6) is significantly older than was once thought. In the words of De Purucker (1973):

the Great Pyramid was built at least seventy-five thousand years ago, and I am of the opinion it was twice that length of time, 150 thousand years ago, as is the megalithic architecture found worldwide.

This megalithic architecture extends from the Pacific Ocean (Figure 0.8) to the Mediterranean Sea (Figure 0.5, 0.6, 0.9) and from the Americas (Figure 0.7) to the British Isles (Figure 0.10).

The intriguing mystery of the world-wide distribution of megalithic architecture and the possible civilisations that created it follow in the next chapter.


Figure 0.4: Timelines relating terms used in this work to describe past Periods and Eras and relating these to normally accepted academic terms


Figure 0.5: The Queen’s Chamber, Cheops Pyramid. Chamber: 47 m (154 ft) long x 8.48 m (27 ft 10 in.) high (touristegypt.com)	Figure: 0.6: Pyramid of Khufu (Cheops), Giza, Egypt. Passage to the Grand Gallery with a corbelled vault ceiling (touristegypt.com)


Figure 0.7: Giant Olmec head 3.3 m (10 ft) high, La Venta Archaeological Site nr Huimanguillo, Mexico. Some believe the Olmecs came to South America from Mu or Lemuria (Chapter 2). (Courtesy: © Philip Baird)	Figure 0.8: The partly inundated ancient city of Nan Madol, Pohnpei, in Micronesia, South Pacific Ocean: entrance to mortuary area of city (Courtesy: © janeresture.com)


Figure 0.9: The Mnajdra cyclopeaen Temple, Malta. (Courtesy: © M. Gray stonepages.com)	Figure 0.10: Alignment of megaliths at Drizzlecombe, Dartmouth, England. (Courtesy: Ian Honeywood)