[CTRL] The Stargate conspiracy

[Taylor, John (JH)]

 -Caveat Lector-

 http://www.templarlodge.com/index.html
The Stargate Conspiracy
by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince

Revealing the truth behind extraterrestrial contact,
military intelligence and the mysteries of Ancient Egypt



The Stargate Conspiracy - Overview

Following the release of The Templar Revelation by Lynn Picknett and Clive
Prince, the Templar Lodge is pleased to announce the national launch of
their sequel, The Stargate Conspiracy, published by Little Brown. This page
contains exclusive transcripts of related talks delivered at the Templar
Lodge Hotel.

You are warmly invited to contribute towards an online public database of
information in connection with The Stargate Conspiracy. Entitled the
Stargate Assembly, this arena explores issues arising from the book, list
associated web sites and monitors press sources.

Members of the public are also invited to attend an interactive series of
conferences at the Templar Lodge Hotel either in person or by videolink via
the Internet.



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The Stargate Assembly - Online Updates...
Although further details will be posted to this page as they become
available, we recommend that you join our Stargate Assembly mailing list by
entering your details below:

Name:
Email Address:
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Other (state city, county, country):

Please confirm to send:   or




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The Stargate Conspiracy - Introduction
by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince

Revealing the truth behind extraterrestrial contact,
military intelligence and the mysteries of Ancient Egypt

The Stargate Conspiracy exposes the most insidious, disturbing - and
successful - mass manipulation of our times. Designed to bring us, hearts,
minds and souls under the total control of the conspirators, this sinister
programme has ruthlessly exploited our Millennial craving for signs and
wonders - even hijacking the predicted return of the ancient gods.

The Conspiracy...

Its central focus is the belief that the gods of the ancient world were
extraterrestrials who created and civilised the human race, that they're
back - and that, communicating through special chosen ones, they are
actively directing the way we think.

However, The Stargate Conspiracy reveals that this romantic and exciting
scenario was in fact the brainchild of the West's most powerful intellectual
agencies. Designed to become a new religion for the 21st century, its real
purpose is political - to make us easier to control.

Centred on the search for lost secrets of the pyramid builders, this
extraordinary true story reveals the links between US scientific
intelligence agencies, Mars and ancient Egypt. For almost 50 years, like
Frankenstein's monster, this conspiracy has been put together from cultish -
but astonishingly powerful - belief systems, culminating in the emergence of
a new fundamentalism that is gathering strength by feeding on Millennium
fever.

Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince reveal the secret agenda that unites
apparently independent authors and researchers - including top names with
millions of readers worldwide - and which is targeted to all of us. The
Stargate Conspiracy reveals that even the genuine mysteries of the gods
themselves have been hijacked by powerful cabals - which include top
industrialists, politicians, scientists and intelligence agencies such as
MI5 and the CIA - in order to fulfill their secret agenda. At the heart of
this conspiracy is the belief that the ancient Egyptian gods were - and are
- extra terrestrial beings, that certain key people are in contact with
them, and that they are about to return through the 'stargate' between our
world and theirs.

Are we prepared for the imminent return of the gods? And will we be expected
unquestioningly to accept the conspirators as our spokesmen? Or is this an
exercise in mass manipulation designed to make us support the conspirators?
As they calculatedly whip up Millennium fever, triumphantly persuading us
that they alone know how to talk to the gods, this book serves as a serious
warning to mankind.

The Main Points:

 Over the last few years, the public has come to accept specific ideas about
the 'message' of ancient Egypt, largely due to the works of certain
high-profile authors. But we demonstrate that many of the principles of this
'New Egyptology' are not only based on false-premises, but have also been
used by others as part of a secret long-term agenda.

 We reveal the shadowy presence of US government agencies behind the current
interest in the Giza plateau.

 An essential part of this plot is the alleged link between ancient Egypt
and a lost civilisation on Mars, based on the discovery of supposedly
artificial features on that planet. We show that this view is seriously
flawed, and that the intelligence agencies are actively encouraging the
promotion of a meaningful Egypt-Mars connection.

 We show that key people in the promotion of the 'message' of Egypt and Mars
are involved in a cultish cabal who believes they are in direct contact with
extraterrestrial intelligences from Sirius who claim to be the gods of
ancient Egypt. This group, which has existed for almost fifty years, has
included many famous names, multimillionaires and cutting-edge scientists.
It has also, disturbingly, had a profound influence on the decision-making
of certain world leaders...

 The Stargate Conspiracy reveals that this group was in fact cynically and
deliberately manipulated from the first by the CIA - and that this programme
is ongoing.

 We trace the inspiration for the conspiracy back to the ideology of certain
extreme right-wing occult movements of the 19th and 20th centuries.

 We conclude that the conspirators are deliberately harnessing the most
profound and cherished beliefs of today's society - from fundamentalist
Christianity and the 'message' of ancient civilisations to the alien
abduction scenario - to create a new, more widely acceptable religion for
the post-Millennial West. We reveal that, underlying the apparently
acceptable tenets of this religion is an insidious right-wing ideology., the
true danger lurking inside the Trojan Horse of its New Age image.

 However, even though the manipulators have abused and hijacked the ancient
Egyptian mysteries for their own ends, that does not mean that there are no
such mysteries.

We reveal the ground-breaking research that provides a plausible answer to
the most enduring questions about the ancient Egyptians' achievements and
beliefs - and, explosively, uncover the true nature of the gods
themselves...


320pp, ISBN 0 316 64861 2



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Stargate Conspiracy Triggers Massive Censorship Row
A.O.L. ACTIONS CENSOR CRITICISM OF C.I.A.

The launch of a new book (July 17th) entitled The Stargate Conspiracy by
Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, and published by Little Brown, has triggered
a massive censorship row across the Internet. The book exposes governmental
plans to hijack Millennium mysteries, through political interference or by
manipulating belief structures.

Evidence has come to light that AOL, the UK's largest subscription based
Internet service, is through its actions assisting CIA designs on
introducing a new belief system and form of racist fundamentalism for the
New Age.

Despite connecting 8 million users across the UK and Europe, and carrying
over 55 million "Instant Messages" every day, AOL has engineered a sudden
and unexpected clampdown on Egypt News, an independent electronic newsletter
supplied free of charge to 600 voluntary subscribers. Having operated
successfully and completely unhindered since September 1997, Egypt News now
defends itself amidst accusations of 'spamming' - a term used to describe
the delivery of unsolicited mail across the Internet.

Whilst AOL claims to have responded as a result of a single complainant,
Egypt News vehemently defend themselves, saying that subscribers are able to
cancel their subscription without charge and at any time, adding that AOL
closed down the service by changing its password without any form of
consultation or investigation. In a statement, Chris Ogilvie-Herald, editor
of Egypt News, asks "Does this not raise serious questions concerning the
freedom and transmission of information?"

He adds: "Despite our explanations that we were not sending unsolicited
mail, AOL expressed no interest in reviewing the situation, reading the
content of prior postings, acknowledge that the service was of a
non-commercial nature, nor recognise the fact that it could not be termed
unsolicited mail."

A key clue into the reasoning behind AOL's intransigence appears to lie in
the content of the offending Egypt News article. In less than 30 lines, this
message describes the content of The Stargate Conspiracy, a book by Lynn
Picknett and Clive Prince which exposes a long term plan to take advantage
of the turn of the Millennium by mixing established religious beliefs with
ideas relating to ancient Egypt, extraterrestrial contact, alien abductions
and channelling. Speaking on the unusual experiences of Egypt News, Clive
Prince says "It is interesting that our posting provoked it".

The Stargate Conspiracy reveals that behind the plot are intelligence
agencies of more than one country, but led by the CIA as part of the
Pentagons psychological warfare and parapsychology experiments. Involving
the use of false prophets, ideas promoted by famous authors, hallucinogenic
drugs, hypnosis and electromagnetic influence, the conspiracy has already
influenced the decision making of world leaders and has led one social
scientist to state that the project was "an elaborate psychological
experiment sponsored by the defense community".

However, unexplained experiences have not been restricted to email
messaging. As part of the offending email, subscribers to Egypt News were
referred to the official website for the book - a public forum for issues
arising, debate and questions to the authors known online as the Stargate
Assembly. However this website has experienced extremely erratic access
patterns and an extraordinary level of interest from Virginia, USA,
headquarters of the CIA. Within days of full details being posted, access
rates for information on the The Stargate Conspiracy inexplicably dropped by
at least 80%, whilst at the same time monitoring from Virginia peaked at 69%
of total traffic.

IS A.O.L. ASSISTING C.I.A. NETWORK?

Despite claiming to provide customers and businesses with "an unprecedented
array of new choices", AOL's action against Egypt News appears to have acted
against the terms of the Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA), a group
devoted to the protection of free speech on the Internet, and of which AOL
is a founder member.

Speaking on May 12, 1999, David Phillips of AOL Europe, confirmed that the
ICRA initiative was being taken to provide "concerned citizens the tools to
protect their children and communities while ensuring the essential openness
and freedom of the Internet." Chairman of the ICRA board, Jens Waltermann,
added "It is not for us or for governments to decide what is inappropriate."


Further announcements made on June 10th and 17th, 1999, declared AOL to be
operating an alliance with both BSkyB and Verio Inc. Targetting both Sky
subscribers and web users via traditional forms of direct mail and
television advertising as well as by means of banner advertisements designed
to guarantee "millions of impressions" across the Internet, AOL's activities
appears to operate against their own anti-spamming principles as applied to
Egypt News.

If you thought that this issue does not affect you, the chances are that it
does now. Within such an operational framework, AOL have recently announced
intentions to provide free Internet services to all schools in the UK,
including adult education centres, most recently announcing an agreement
with the Scottish Borders Council Education Department.

And in a recent attempt to connect all of Europe's parliamentarians to the
web, Andreas Schmidt, President and Chief Executive Officer for AOL Europe
said: "All politicians, regardless of country or party, should have the same
opportunity to access, explore and use online services in the same way as
their constituents".

If AOL is indeed guilty of censorship, should the organisation take action
against itself for operating in favour of the CIA, against agreed ICRA
principles, or for its own commercial 'spamming' otherwise known as
advertising? What is the precise nature of AOL's involvement in politics and
the education of our children? Is AOL exerting self-defined 'parental
controls' on the adult global community? Whatever the case, AOL continues to
claim ease of use, convenience and unique content, whilst at the same time
it clamps down on a free newsletter promoting Egypt to an entirely voluntary
membership.

BOOK LAUNCH

Despite such experiences, both Egypt News and the Stargate Assembly continue
to support The Stargate Conspiracy. Although AOL UK returned the email
facility of Egypt News on appeal, the newsletter feels compelled to email
their 600 subscribers in batches of only 10. Chris Ogilvie-Herald has been
looking at the possibility of reestablishing his facility on an alternative
service, reasoning that "AOL told us that if we continue operating Egypt
News in the same manner, we would again be censored and eventually the
account would be terminated". Similarly, the Stargate Assembly continues to
host information, lectures and debate in connection with the The Stargate
Conspiracy.

Further details on the unusual circumstances surrounding this book,
including a forwarding address for Egypt News, a copy of their offending
email, and details of the Stargate Assembly are available on the Internet at
http://www.templarlodge.com/assembly.html.

Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince will be celebrating the official launch of
their book by signing copies of The Stargate Conspiracy at the Templar Lodge
Hotel, Gullane, near Edinburgh on Saturday 17th July.



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Millennial Myth-Making
An exclusive update to members of the Stargate Assembly
by LYNN PICKNETT and CLIVE PRINCE

Despite its laudable intentions, 'Alternative Egyptology' is, in fact, a
minefield. Not only are there many competing theories claiming to solve the
very real mysteries of ancient Egypt - which, until recently, have been the
subject of a generally good-natured debate - but there are also individuals
and groups with vested interests, who seek to use those mysteries in order
to sell other ideas of a religious, esoteric or even political nature.

Which of the theories you accept usually comes down to whether you accept
the author's particular interpretation of the data - the monuments,
artefacts and texts that survive from ancient Egypt. However, when there is
a disagreement about the data itself the debate becomes much more clear-cut:
a statement of fact is either right or wrong.

Our research for The Stargate Conspiracy found serious factual errors in the
works of some of the key figures in this field, in particular Robert Bauval,
Graham Hancock, John Anthony West and Robert Temple. These errors are so
fundamental that, if we are correct, they undermine many of these writers'
central theories.

The best example is the supposed significance of the year 10500 BC, which is
promoted so strongly by Hancock and Bauval. The climatic and astronomical
evidence that they put forward is, as we demonstrate, basically wrong.

Since The Stargate Conspiracy was published in July, none of the authors
have responded to our criticisms - although there's been a lot of
behind-the-scenes shenannigans, some threats of legal action, and a
successful attempt to put commercial pressure on our publishers as
'punishment' for daring to publish the book.

Yet the authors we criticise have kept a remarkably low profile when it
comes to responding to our points. For example, Graham Hancock was due to
take part in a live debate with us on national radio recently, but pulled
out at the last minute. And it is not only our criticisms they have blithely
ignored, but also those by others within the Alternative Egypt field itself.
Why are they avoiding the issue? After all, the easiest way to publicly
undermine our credibility, and that of their other critics, would be to
prove us wrong.

As one-time avid fans of their books ourselves, we certainly feel cheated at
what appears to be such a lack of respect for their readership - to whom,
after all, they owe their reputations - as to constitute outright contempt.

It's ironic that Bauval and Hancock have frequently taken the high moral
ground and accused academic Egyptologists of brushing aside criticism and
suppressing dissenting voices. We now appear to have a new Egyptological
orthodoxy with all the dogmatism and high-handedness of the old.

Yet it's not just the past that the New Orthodoxy seeks to reinterpret. They
see the past as containing messages for our immediate future, giving
prophecies of imminent global transformation - as in Bauval and Hancock's
Keeper of Genesis, for example. In recent postings on the Daily Grail
promoting his forthcoming book Secret Chamber, Bauval continues to build up
Messianic expectations for the Millennium.

For example, in describing his visit to the chamber beneath the 'water
shaft' at Giza, Bauval refers to the 'fabled Hall of Records'. 'Fabled'?
Does the idea of the Hall of Records really have the long and venerable
pedigree he implies?

The existence of a Hall of Records beneath Giza, connected with the Sphinx
and dating from 10500 BC, appeared for the first time in the psychic
readings of Edgar Cayce in the 1920s. Cayce also predicted that the Hall of
Records would be rediscovered by 1998, and that this would usher in a New
Age, in which the 'Master of the World' would return (taken by some to mean
the Second Coming), a new race would appear and - tellingly - the ideals and
doctrines of Freemasonry would dominate the world.

However, Cayce has one of the worst track records of any prophet: virtually
all of his predictions to date have failed dismally. Even so, many people
continue to believe in him and his prophecies, particularly concerning the
Hall of Records. Now that 1998 has passed without its discovery, there
appears to be a concerted effort to link the it with the excavation of the
water shaft chamber, which did happen last year (although, in fact, the
chamber itself has been known about since the 1930s).

(The water shaft and chamber are discussed briefly in our book, but a more
detailed examination appears in Ian Lawton and Chris Ogilvie-Herald's Giza:
The Truth, published in the UK this week.)

Bauval has recently distanced himself from the Cayce circus, writing on
Egyptnews (17 June): 'It is no secret that I do not condone either the
so-called reading of Cayce or the other material that is promoted by the
ARE, such as the Second Coming, reincarnated entities from Atlantis and such
like hare brained stuff.'

This is fine as far as it goes, but by writing of a 'fabled' Hall of
Records, Bauval is perpetuating the common fallacy that you can reject the
prophet but keep the prophecy. The fact is that the term 'Hall of Records'
and the concept of an underground depository of lost wisdom connected with
the Sphinx originated with Cayce. It is true that there are Egyptian, Arab
and Masonic legends of hidden artefacts or texts in Egypt, but they relate
either to the Great Pyramid or to places other than Giza. None make the
association with the Sphinx or with an underground chamber, and none use the
term 'Hall of Records', which was an invention of Cayce's.

Bauval goes further in his posting of 15 August, relating the Masonic
symbolism of the Millennium Night ceremony in which a gilded capstone is to
be placed on the top of the Great Pyramid, and the 'coincidence' of the
culmination of Sirius at the same time, to Messianic ideas concerning the
births of Horus and Jesus.

The meaning for American Freemasons of the capstone ceremony is explored in
The Stargate Conspiracy. Briefly, it relates to the symbolism of the design
on the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States, which appears on
dollar bills. This shows an incomplete pyramid with the famous (or
notorious) 'eye in the triangle' symbol floating above it.

In the early 1930s - but not, as far as we can trace, before - this symbol
began to be associated with predictions of the global domination of the USA
and Freemasonry. The parallel with Cayce's prophecy relating to the Hall of
Records, made around the same time, is obvious. (Significantly, Cayce was a
Mason.) The first prominent Freemason to promote this concept was Henry A.
Wallace, the politician who had the design incorporated onto dollar bills
and who later became Vice President under Roosevelt. Wallace was also one of
the key figures in the origins of what we call the 'Stargate Conspiracy' in
the early 1950s.

To be fair, some readers have taken us to task for describing this image as
Masonic, pointing out that it is not one of the traditional symbols of
Masonry. This is true. Although the 'eye in the triangle' image is known
from at least the 16th century, it does not appear as an explicitly Masonic
icon until this century. Why it was chosen for the US Great Seal is unknown.
However, the important point is that Wallace and other Masons came to
believe that it was Masonic, and to interpret it in Masonic terms.

The placing of the gilded capstone on the Great Pyramid at the moment of
midnight at the Millennium is - whether intentional or not - a potent symbol
for modern American Freemasons who accept Henry Wallace's interpretation. It
represents the 'completion' of the pyramid and this, according to Wallace,
symbolises the dawn of an era in which the United States and Freemasonry
will be the dominant forces in the world. The fact that this coincides with
the culmination of Sirius - when it is directly south of Giza, and at its
highest point - is something that will not have escaped those who seek to
exploit the meaning of such apparently symbolic events.

On the subject of Sirius in Masonic lore, there is a difference of opinion
among Freemasons. Many authorities attribute the symbols described by Bauval
to Venus rather than Sirius - see, for example, Christopher Knight and
Robert Lomas's recently-published Uriel's Machine.

The fact that, seen from Giza, Sirius culminates a minute after midnight on
31 December 1999 is not as unique an event as Bauval implies. In fact, it
has culminated within a minute or two either side of midnight at New Year in
most years since the beginning of the 20th century, and will continue to do
until about 2100. And there have been about twenty occasions this century
when, rather than culminating at 12.01, Sirius has reached its highest point
at midnight exactly - a much more significant moment, if one is looking for
symbolism.

By linking these events with the birth of Jesus (although his connecting
Sirius and the Star of Bethlehem is, to say the least, extremely debatable)
and the onset of the Age of Horus, Bauval has added a decidedly Messianic
gloss. Is this - despite his sceptical words about Cayce's prophecy - a hint
of the Second Coming?

The aim of The Stargate Conspiracy is to show how such potent symbolism is
being deliberately manipulated by those with their own, very disturbing,
agendas, specifically in order to heighten expectancy around the Millennium.
The kind of Messianic message being strongly hinted at by Robert Bauval
plays straight into their hands.

YONAGUNI - AN UPDATE

Recently, more of the evidence put forward to support the theory of an
advanced, global civilisation that came to an end in 10500 BC has been
challenged. This relates to the underwater features, or structures, at
Yonaguni in Japan. In Heaven's Mirror, Graham Hancock argues that they are
another product of that long-lost civilisation, and were submerged by the
rise in sea level that accompanied the end of the last Ice Age, at least
10,000 years ago.

In June we were invited to speak at the world conference of the Archeaology,
Astronomy and SETI Research Association in Germany. Also on the bill was
Professor Masaki Kimura, the Japanese seismologist and geologist who first
brought Yonaguni to the world's - and Hancock's - attention.

Whether the features are natural or man-made is still a matter for debate.
Kimura firmly believes them to be artificial, but, even so, his latest
research suggests that they have a much more recent origin. Various methods,
including the carbon dating of organic material associated with the site,
give a date of construction of around 400 AD.

Kimura believes that the monument was built by the Chinese, and firmly
rejects the idea that it was submerged at the end of the last Ice Age,
pointing out that the area is subject to great variations in sea level
because of seismic activity.



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A Statement
by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince

It has been suggested that postings on this web site, giving an overview of
the content of The Stargate Conspiracy, imply that certain authors hold
racist and anti-Muslim views. We do not believe that the original postings
had such a meaning and we never intended that it should. We would,
therefore, like to make a clear statement of our conclusions on this matter.


What we call the Stargate Conspiracy is a concerted attempt to construct a
new system of belief using highly evocative ideas about mankind's ancient
past, the influence of extraterrestrials on human civiltsation, and
predictions of global upheavals linked to the Millennium. Those behind the
conspiracy have pressed many ideas into the service of the new belief
system, including the theories of 'Alternative Egyptology', the prophecies
of Edgar Cayce, the belief in the Face and Pyramids on Mars and the alien
abduction phenomenon. This includes selected parts of the ideas of popular
authors on the mysteries of ancient Egypt, such as Robert Bauval, Graham
Hancock, John Anthony West and Robert Temple, which have been used in ways
that those authors would not support.

At the heart of the conspiracy is a network of people who believe themselves
to be in communication with powerful extraterrestrial intelligences, the
Council of Nine, who claim to be the gods of ancient Egypt. Ultimately, all
the above ideas have been made to serve the belief in the reality of the
Nine and therefore to support their teachings about mankind and its place in
the cosmic scheme - teachings that are accepted by many thousands of people
worldwide. This includes anti-Muslim sentiments and racial ideas that many
people, not just ourselves, find extremely disturbing and dangerous.

We are NOT saying, or even implying, that those whose ideas and theories are
being used share these beliefs. We do not believe this to be the case. This
should be clear from reading The Stargate Conspiracy.



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The 'City of the Gods' Discovered at Giza
An exclusive update to members of the Stargate Assembly
by LYNN PICKNETT and CLIVE PRINCE

Since the final manuscript of The Stargate Conspiracy was completed, a new
claim of a discovery of wonders in Egypt has emerged. It is particularly
interesting when set against the conclusions of our book.

What we call the Stargate Conspiracy may at first seem like something from
Chris Carter's nightmares, but even more horrifying is the fact that this is
real. Although several intelligence agencies are involved the prime mover is
the CIA, indood the plot began just a few years after it was formed.
Briefly, the conspiracy involves manipulating potent archetypal symbols and
ideas in order to create what is essentially a new global religion. The
concepts they have stolen include the very real mysteries of ancient Egypt,
the so-called Monuments of Mars and the belief in extraterrestrial contact
in the remote past.

The ultimate message they are relentlessly pushing is that the gods of
ancient Egypt were, in reality, advanced extraterrestrial beings - and that
they are back1 Already certain selected individuals believe themselves to be
in psychic communication with them, and are preparing mankind for the
reopening of direct contact.

One of the key pillars of the Stargate Conspiracy is the promotion of the
belief in the imminent discovery of hidden wonders beneath the Giza Plateau
- a discovery that will, in some way, pull all the threads together and,
essentially, prove the reality of the space-gods.

One of out greatest difficulties in researching The Stargate Conspiracy was
in evaluating the many stories of secret searches for hidden chambers at
Giza, either within the monuments themselves or beneath the ground. On the
one hand, there is undeniable evidence that such a search has been going on
for nearly 30 years, and that, at least in the 1970s, agencies of the United
States government were heavily involved in it. More recently, the search has
been carried on by individuals and organisations with a more esoteric
agenda, such as John Anthony West and the Association for Research and
Enlightenment (ABE), the Edgar Cayce organisation.

On the other hand, although there have been plentiful rumours of discoveries
- either by excavation or remote sensing (hard science, not to be confused
with remote viewing) -  every one has turned out to be either insubstantial
(eg the claim that chambers beneath the Sphinx were entered in the summer ot
1998) or simply exaggerations of less sensational finds (eg the chamber
beneath the 'water shaft' that has received much attention recently).

Faced with such contradictory data, we could only conclude that either a
highly secret search is under way at Giza, but is being hidden behind a
smokescreen of disinformation, or (which seems to be increasingly likely)
that certain parties want us to think that there is. In the latter case, the
true purpose of the exercise is to foster a belief not only in imminent
revelations from Egypt, but also that a privileged few already know there is
something to he found.

A new book by Ian Lawton and Chris Ogilvie-Herald, Giza: The Truth, which is
due out in August, should go a long way to clarifying the conflicting claims
about hidden finds in Egypt.

It is against this background that the latest claim needs to be placed.

One of the major figures in our investigation is Dr. James J. Hurtak, the
Californian mystic and polymath who has played a key role in all the major
aspects of the emerging belief system. He was involved in explorations at
Giza in the 1970s, was one of the major proponents of the Face and Pyramids
of Mars (and their connection with Egypt), and, since 1973, has claimed to
be in psychic contact with highly-evolved extraterrestrial intelligences,
including the Council of Nine (who proclaim themselves the gods of ancient
Egypt). He is the author of The Keys of Enoch, which is based on the
revelations given to him by his otherwordly source.

Two years ago, the rumour began to circulate that Hurtak had discovered, and
entered, a vast underground complex in the Giza area. This was protected by
some kind of force field, but Hurtak knew the correct acoustic key for
disabling it. He was then privileged to see virtually a subterranean city
including, among other marvels, the body of Osiris.

These stories were first reported in lectures by the New Age leader Drunvalo
Melchizedek. This individual. has a considerable international following in
New Age circles, and is the head of a movement known as the Flower of Life.
Melchizedek claims to be a 'walk-in' (one who has agreed for their body to
be possessed by a higher spirit entity) of an angelic being.

Nelchizedek's teaching incorporates such concepts as communication with the
inhabitants of a planet orbiting Sirius B -  citing Robert Temple's The
Sirius Mystery as evidence -  and the fall of Atlantis around 11000 BC.

Drunvalo Melchizedek's relationship with Dr Hurtak is unclear. Although
Hurtak has disavowed any 'official' connection with him, there is a
suspicious resemblance between Melchizedeks teaching and that of The Keys of
Enoch. Melchizedek's choice of alias is also suggestive -  the significance
of the Old Testament character of that name and the modern order of
Melchizedek is discussed in Chapter 6 of The Stargate Conspiracy.

In his 1997 lectures, Melchizedek doscribed the opening of the Giza
'underworld' but did not name the individual concerned.

Shortly afterwards, Dr Hurtak issued statements on the Internet denying
rumours that he was the anonymous person.

However,  in 1998 and early 1999, in lectures in Australia and Europe,
Hurtak told essentially the same story, but this time acknowledged himself
as the one who had found the way into this subterranean 'City of the Gods,
as it is now called. The full story was posted on the Library of New On-Line
Australia (http://www.newage.com.au) by Paul White. (White is a documentary
producer and director who has championed recent claims of a link between
ancient Egypt and Australia.)

It is claimed that the complex was discovered by remote sensing in 1978, and
that as a result a secret agreement was made (presumably by the United
States) with President Anwar Sadat to allow exploration of the system. Dr
Hurtak is described as one of the 'key scientists' involved in this
top-secret project.

In his lectures, Hurtak showed video footage of the halls and chambers. He
has promised that this footage will be released later this year, in time for
the Millennium. Those who have seen it claim that it shows vast, colonnaded
underground halls the size of cathedrals, underground waterways and even a
kilometer-wide lake, all deep beneath the Giza Plateau. Hurtak also claimed
that records and other artefacts have been discovered in sealed chambers.

Obviously, we await public release of this material with considerable
interest. Until then, we can only make some preliminary observations.

The idea that there is a network of chambers and tunnels beneath Giza is not
new. It is, for example, explored in Andrew Collins's Gods of Eden (1998).
Collins and others have pointed out that such a subterranean system should
exist, as Giza is a limestone plateau, and caves and underground rivers are
characteristic of such features. There are suggestions in ancient Egyptian
tests that the halls and pathways of the Duat are literal, rather than
symbolic, descriptions of what lies beneath Rostau, the ancient name for
Giza. If the ancient Egyptians had accessed and built in such a network this
would, of course, be a major, exciting discovery.

But while it is possible that some kind of network of tunnels may exist
under Giza, we should treat Hurtak's other claims more cautiously. For
example, he states that it is 15,000 years old and that it was built by the
civilisation of Atlantis, which he describes as the fourth root race
(thereby linking the discovery to 19th-century occult racial ideas that
influenced, among others, the Nazis). How does he know? And does this
discovery really, as suggested, confirm the quasi-religious scheme outlined
in The Keys of Enoch (a book which, as readers of The Stargate Conspiracy
will be aware, in our opinion contains some very disturbing ideas) -

Hurtak also links the discovery to imminent global changes and the return of
higher beings who guided mankind in the remote past. He states that we are
currently at the end of a cycle that began 13,000 years (half a precessional
cycle) ago, and that this will be a time of great upheavals and catastrophes
which will mark the passing of the human race (or at least part of it) into
a new evolutionary stage. This, of course, draws upon ideas popularised by
Robert Dauval and Graham Hancock in Keeper of Genesis (1996). Hurtak also
puts forward the evidence for a lost civilisation gathered by Hancock in
Fingerprints of the Gods in support of his assertions.

In the final chapter of The Stargate Conspiracy, we predict that some kind
of momentous event or revelation connected with Giza might well be
stage-managed to coincide with the Millennium, and that this would have the
effect of crystallising the various elements of the new belief system. This
may be promoted off the back of a genuine discovery or could be entirely
manufactured.

We await developments in this story with great interest. Anybody with more
information, comments or observation can send an email to the Stargate
Assembly.


320pp, ISBN 0 316 64861 2



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----


GATEWAY TO THE GODS
A New Approach to the Mysteries of Ancient Egypt

Exclusive extract from a lecture by
LYNN PICKNETT and CLIVE PRINCE
at the Templar Lodge Hotel, Gullane, near Edinburgh, Scotland,
7th June 1999

Our research for The Stargate Conspiracy - although mainly leading to the
uncovering of the conspiracy of the title - also opened up other, more
positive and exciting, avenues that offer a solution to some of the enduring
mysteries of ancient Egypt.

Previously, we discussed the two most popular theories put forward to
explain the puzzle of the ancient Egyptians' inexplicably advanced
techniques - that the ancient Egyptians either learned their skills from a
lost civilisation, or from visiting extraterrestrials. We would now like to
offer an alternative theory, which, although not evoking Atlanteans or
space-gods still has a resolutely otherwordly quality.

The technical achievements of the ancient Egyptians, as displayed most
obviously in the building of monuments such as the Great Pyramid and the
Sphinx of Giza, and the questions that they pose for conventional
historians, are too well known to need repeating here. But it was not only
in this area that the Egyptians were so sophisticated. Even in the
superficial field of cosmetics, recent discoveries have shown that their
practical application of chemistry was far from primitive. In fact, they did
what Givenchy and Christian Dior have only just begun to do, incorporating
active sun-block into foundation creams. However, what most intrigued was
the extraordinary cosmological knowledge that can be found within their
religious texts.

The earliest religion known in ancient Egypt was that of Heliopolis. Now
buried under a suburb of Cairo, and marked by a single obelisk, Heliopolis
was the greatest religious centre of ancient Egypt, and home to not only
what we would call religion, bur also every other kind of knowledge, from
philosophy and medicine to cosmology. The High Priest of Heliopolis also
held the title that translates as 'Chief Astronomer'. Imhotep, the genius
who designed and built the first pyramid, the Step Pyramid of Djoser at
Saqqara, was a priest of Heliopolis.

We don't know when Heliopolis was established, but we do know that when
records began in Egypt it was already the supreme religious centre. The
religion of Heliopolis was the religion of the pyramid builders. In fact,
the three Giza pyramids align with Heliopolis, which is 12 miles (20km)
away. This is one alignment that is even accepted by Egyptologists.

The religion of Heliopolis is encapsulated in the famous Pyramid Texts,
which are hieroglyphic inscriptions covering the walls of some fourth
dynasty pyramids. Although the earliest inscripions date from some 200 years
after the building of the Great Pyramid, there is no doubt that the texts
are much older. From studying them, we can discover not only what the
Heliopolitan priesthood believed in a religious sense, but also the extent
of their knowledge in other areas.

The central theme of the Pyramid Texts is the afterlife - or rather the
presumed afterlife - journey of the King, in which he is identified with the
god Osiris and ascends to the heavens where he is transformed into a star.
In this otherwordly realm he has many adventures in which he encounters
various gods and other entities, and has to persuade them to accept him into
their ranks. When this happens he is reincarnated as his own successor, in
the form of Osiris's son Horus.

The most fundamental revelation of the Pyramid Texts is that the
Heliopolitan religion was essentially monotheistic. (Will admirers of
Akhenaten please take note!) Although there were many god-forms, they were
all understood to represent the many aspects of the One God, Atum. In fact,
all living things were considered as part of Atum, including mankind.

In the Heliopolitan creation story, in the beginning the Universe was a
formless, watery void, called Nun. Out of this emerged a phallic-shaped
hill, the primeval mound, the centre of all creation. On this hill, Atum
masturbated himself to an explosive orgasm that both gave birth to the
Universe and seeded it with life. From this act, the Universe expanded
outward, becoming ever more complex and unfolding through many levels of
creation until the material world that we inhabit came into being.

Atum was hermaphroditic, encompassing both male and female principles. But
immediately after his creative act, two beings, the god Shu and the goddess
Tefnut, emerge. Another name for Tefnut is Ma'at, goddess of eternal justice
and balance. Shu is the male principle, the active force, and Tefnut the
female principle that limits, controls and directs the male. The principle
of duality - similar to the Taoist yin-yang - is fundamental to the
Heliopolitan system.

>From the union of Shu and Tefnut are born Geb, the Earth god and Nut, the
sky goddess. They, in turn, give birth to the famous double pair of
brother-sister twins, Isis and Osiris, and Nephyts and Set. They express the
principle of duality in two ways - male-female and light-dark.

These are the nine gods of the Great Ennead, but they remain only
expressions of Atum, reaching through the levels of creation from the void
Nun to the world of matter in which we live. To the Helipolitans, Osiris was
also Geb, and Shu, and Atum.

Through the offspring of Isis and Osiris, the magical child Horus, the
system is repeated. Horus becomes head of the Lesser Ennead, the nine gods
of this world. Horus is to this plane of existence what Atum is to the
Universe. Horus is, in effect, the god of this world.

The Heliopolitan system is multi-layered and expresses several ideas at once
in an extremely elegant way. For example, in an association of imagery, the
emergence of Atum's hill from Nun was equated with the rising of the sun,
and the daily 'birth' of the sun was considered a microcosm of the original
creation event. This is why Atum is associated with the sun-god Ra,
sometimes referred to as Ra-Atum.

This explains much of the fluidity, and apparent confusion, in the way the
ancient Egyptians seem to have mixed and matched their gods. For example,
the association of Atum and Horus explains why the Sphinx of Giza was called
variously, and simultaneously, the 'Living Image of Atum', Horakhti ('Horus
of the Horizon') and Ra-Horakhti. It was built to face towards the rising
sun, Ra, which equated with the creation of the Universe by Atum, who was
also identified with Horus, head of the Lesser Ennead and god of this world.


But there is more to this complex and elegant system than simply a series of
metaphysical correspondences.

In the Heliopolitan creation myth the Universe bursts forth from a point of
singularity and expands, as it does so becoming ever more complex as new
levels of creation come into existence until the material world that we
inhabit appears. This is strikingly similar to modern theories of the
origins and evolution of the Universe - the 'Big Bang' and 'Expanding
Universe' theories. But the Heliopolitan myths go a lot further than this.

Although Nun, the original void, is formless, it is also described as water.
It is within this that Atum's Hill appears - which is equated with the sun.
Interestingly, scientists have only recently discovered that water is found
in interstellar space in far greater quantities than previously considered
possible. It is now believed that such clouds of water play a vital role in
the creation of stars - in other words, suns. Modern scientists are, in
effect, saying that suns emerge from water - formless clouds of water. Is it
possible that the priests and priestesses of Heliopolis knew this as well?

There is another, equally provocative, parallel. Recently, a NASA team
researching the origins of life in the Universe made an astonishing
announcement. For decades, scientists have been trying to create, in the
laboratory, some of the complex molecules that are necessary for life - and
have always failed. However, this NASA team recreated the conditions found
inside clouds of gas in interstellar space - and found that these extremely
complex molecules could not only be created very easily but virtually formed
themselves. It is, therefore, easier for the molecules necessary for
primitive life to evolve in space than on a planet. They are probably then
'seeded' onto planets by comets, where they can then begin to evolve into
more complex life-forms.

This even led the leader of the NASA team to state: 'I begin to really
believe that life is a cosmic imperative.'

In other words, life - or the potential for life - exists throughout the
Universe. Belgian writer and researcher Philip Coppens has pointed out that
all of this is implicit in the Heliopolitan creation myth, in which Atum
seeds the Universe with life.

It is extremely significant that the most sacred object of Heliopolis was
the ben-ben stone, which most Egyptologists believe to have been of meteoric
origin. The name 'ben-ben' derives from the ancient Egyptian word meaning
'seed' or 'semen', brilliantly encapsulating the concept of the seeding of
life on Earth by objects from space.

Faced with these realisations - as well as the well-known mysteries of the
ancient Egyptians' advanced technical skills - we naturally came to consider
the question of where they had acquired such knowledge. Where, or from whom,
had they learned such things?

But we also asked another question. These mysteries concern things that
happened in the ancient past, and the obvious problem is that we cannot
study the past directly. We cannot go back in time and see what happened for
ourselves. Therefore we are left with the interpretation of archaeological
and textual evidence, which inevitably leads to some degree of speculation.
The question we asked was: is there any parallel for the acquisition of
inexplicably advanced knowledge that we can study directly - in other words,
that is happening in the world today,

We believe that there is.

But first, it is worth considering how we tend to think people learn new
skills. We normally think that there are only two ways - whether we're
talking about an individual or a civilisation. Either we work it our for
ourselves by experimentation or trial and error, or somebody else (who has
already worked it out) teaches us.

This is, in a nutshell, the problem of the anomalous sophistication of
ancient Egypt (and many other ancient civilisations). There is no
archeaological evidence of a process of gradual development of these skills.
So logically we have to invoke the second method, and assume that they were
taught these things, either by a lost civilisation or by ancient astronauts.


But what if there is a third way to acquire knowledge? On an individual
level, we know that there is: inspiration. But can this work for an entire
culture, and if so what would be the mechanism behind it? Is there any
evidence for such a thing?

There is. And it is something that is happening today.

During our research we came across the ground-breaking work of a Swiss
anthroplogist named Jeremy Narby, who in 1995 wrote a book called, in
English, The Cosmic Serpent, DNA and the Origins of Knowledge.

About fifteen years ago, Narby was studying the indigenous people of the
Peruvian Amazon, and became fascinated by their astounding botanical
knwowledge, specifically their use of plants for medical and other purposes.
What intrigued him most was how these supposedly primitive people had
acquired this knowledge.

Since they have no science in the sense that we understand it, they must
have learned how to make their medicines by trial and error. But there are
some 80,000 species of plants growing in the Amazon rain forest, so to
discover an effective remedy using just two of them would theoretically
require the testing of every possible combination - just under four billion.
But many of their medicines involve not just two plants, but several. If
they had found their recipes by experimentation, it would have taken
millions of years to find just a few, and yet they have a vast range of
medicines and other useful substances. Added to this, preparation of many of
them involve long and complex processes with many stages.

The classic example is curare. This is a powerful poison whose ingredients
come from several different plants, and which, Narby points out, fits a very
precise set of requirements. The hunters needed something that, when smeared
on the tips of blow-pipe darts, would not only kill an animal but also
ensure that it does not tighten its death-grip on a branch and die out of
reach (as often happens with animals killed by arrows). And the meat would
have to be safe to eat. It seems like a very tall order - but curare fits
all these requirements perfectly. It is a muscle relaxant, which kills by
arresting the respiratory muscles. It is only effective when injected
directly into the bloodstream, hence its delivery by blowpipe, and has no
effect when taken by mouth.

The most common type of curare requires a complicated method of preparation
in which the extracts of several plants are boiled together for three days,
during which lethal fumes are given off. And the final result needs a
specific piece of technology - the blow-pipe - to deliver it. How was all
this discovered?

The problem becomes even more baffling, because no fewer than forty
different types of curare are used in the Amazon rain forest. All do the
same job but use slightly different ingredients, because the same plants do
not grow in every region. Therefore, in effect, curare was invented forty
times.

After puzzling about such questions for a long time, Narby realised that the
best way to find an answer was to ask the Amazonians themselves. So how do
they claim to have discovered curare - and all the other plants-derived
substances that they use? In fact, they take no credit for them. They claim
that all were given to them by the spirits through their shamans.

Shamans have existed throughout the world, especially in tribal societies.
They are what used to be called witch doctors, especially talented and
highly trained trance psychics, who use their gifts to heal, locate the best
hunting and find water in times of drought. In short, they help to solve the
problems of the tribe, and help it survive.

The shaman does this by going into trance, which can be induced in a variety
of ways, from whirling, drumming and dancing, to taking psychoactive drugs
derived from plants or mushrooms. Those studied by Narby in Peru achieve
their trance by ingesting a plant mixture called ayahuasca, which mimics a
substance found naturally in the human brain and which, in large doses, is a
powerful hallucinogen.

When in trance, the shaman's spirit goes on a journey to another realm, in
which he faces horrible dangers. But once he has overcome his adversaries he
communicates with superior intelligences, who often appear in the form of
animals, who answer his questions.

As in fairy tales, the spirits only answer the questions they are asked -
they seldom, if ever, volunteer extra information. So, if the shaman asks
them how to cure a little village girl's meningitis, they will give him that
information - but they will not also tell him how to cure her mother's
cancer unless he specifically asks. And that may involve another trip.

This is what the Amazonians told Jeremy Narby about how they know the
properties of plants and how to combine them. But they also claim that this
is how they learned of specific techniques, such as woodworking and weaving
- in fact, all the arts and crafts necessary for survival.

We must stress that the Amazonians' knowledge of pharmacology (plant-derived
drugs and their potential and actual uses) is not just surprising for what
are considered primitive peoples, but actually exceeds that of modern
Western science. Many modern medicines were taken from those used in the
Amazon - curare, for example, is used in heart surgery. Even the giant drug
companies do not have the ability to develop products to meet specific
requirements as quickly, easily - and naturally - as the Amazonian shamans
can.

This is, in fact, an exact analogy for the problem posed by the ancient
Egyptians' anomalous knowledge of, for example, highly sophisticated
constructon techniques. Although they are two very different fields of
knowledge, the basic problem in accounting for the knowledge is exactly the
same.

Could it be that the ancient Egyptians acquired the knowledge of how to
build pyramids the shaman's way - by asking the great spirits directly?

It might be thought that it is just too big a step from brewing up potions
to designing and building one of the world's largest and most enduring
buildings, but Jeremy Narby pointed out to us that in some ancient American
civilisations both skills existed side by side. The Aztecs, Incas and Maya
constructed comparable temples to those of Egypt, and attributed their
knowledge of how to build them to their gods. But they also maintained that
the gods had also taught them other arts, such as the use of plants for
healing, and astronomy.

So there is a direct analogue for the mysterious knowledge of, and evidence
of advanced technology in, ancient Egypt - in something that is happening
today.

So could the Heliopolitan religion have been based on a form of shamanism?
It is instructive to look at the experiences of anthropologist Michael
Harner among the Conibo Indians of the Peruvian Amazon in the 1960s. He took
the shamans' hallucinogenic drink and later wrote:

'For several hours after drinking the brew I found myself, though awake, in
a world literally beyond my wildest dreams. I met bird-headed people, as
well as dragon-like creatures who explained that they were the gods of this
world.'

Bird-headed people. Doesn't this remind us of the ibis-headed god Thoth and
the hawk-headed Horus? The Egyptians had many animal-headed gods, including
the fearsome lioness-headed Sekhmet and the jackal-headed Anubis. Do they
all live through the stargate of shamanic vision?

In the Pyramid Texts there are many passages that are an exact parallel for
the shamanic experience.

In the Pyramid Texts we read how the King, who is identified with Osiris,
must face terrifying ordeals, similar to the myth of the god himself, in
which he was cut into pieces by the evil god Set, later to be reassembled
and brought back to life by his sister-wife Isis. This is virtually
identical to the classic shamanic experience in which the shaman is hacked
to pieces and magically reassembled before ascending into the spirit world.

Jeremy Narby made a study of shamanism all over the world, and found many
common themes in shamanic visions. A major example is that of snakes or
serpents being bringers of wisdom. This is found even in cultures living in
regions where there are no snakes.

Another common theme is that of the divine twins, also as bringers of
wisdom. Narby points out that the Aztec word 'coatl', as in the name
Quetzalcoatl, means both 'snake' and 'twin'. This reminds us of the two sets
of twins in the Heliopolitan pantheon - Isis and Osiris, and Nephtys and
Set.

Another central element common to shamanism all over the world is that of a
ladder joining Heaven and Earth, which the shaman ascends to meet the
spirits of wisdom. As Narby says:

'They talk of a ladder, or a vine, a rope, a spiral staircase, a twisted
rope ladder, that connects Heaven and Earth and which they use to gain
access to the world of spirits. They consider these spirits to have come
from the sky and to have created life on Earth.'

Significantly, the same imagery is found in the Pyramid Texts. For example,
speaking of Isis as the personification of the ladder, it says:

'As for any spirit or any god who will help me when I ascend to the sky on
the ladder of the god; my bones are assembled for me, my limbs are gathered
together for me, and I leap up to the sky in the presence of the god of the
lord of the ladder.'

Ascension to the Milky Way is a central theme of the Pyramid Texts.

The fact that Isis is personified as the ladder is interesting because it
brings up the whole question of the role of women in shamanism. We have been
saying 'he' whenever we have talked about shamans, because virtually all of
them are men.

We were at a conference in London about four years ago at which Jeremy Narby
was speaking. During question time, one of the audience asked why he hadn't
mentioned female shamans. He replied that womens' place in this is very
interesting. In the Amazonian shamanic rites he had witnessed, the shaman
takes ayahuasca, goes into trance, and then goes off on his otherwordly
flight. But next to him is a woman, and she accompanies him on his journey,
experiencing exactly the same visions that he experiences. It is her job to
make him recall them when he returns, because shamans often forget their
experiences. But she does this without touching ayahuasca.

How can the women do this without recourse to artificial means - the drug?
It appears that certain women find the shamanic experience comes to them
quite naturally. We don't know the details of this, because in tribal
societies the men's mysteries and the women's mysteries are kept strictly
apart. Until recently, the vast majority of Western anthropologists have
been male, so if they were let in on any secrets it was the male ones. As a
result, the literature on female shamanism is virtually non-existent.

The fact that Isis plays this role in the Pyramid Texts suggests that women
played an important part in Egyptian shamanism - and we know that there were
female priests at Heliopolis.

It is generally accepted as fact that the Pyramid Texts describe the
afterlife journey of the King, but there is much internal evience that this
is simply not so - or rather that they do not exclusively describe an
afterlife journey at all.

We believe that they actually describe the classic out-of-the-body flight of
the shaman, who is, significantly, often regarded as physically dead while
in his trance, in which he visits the world of the dead. The gods and
monsters encountered in the Pyramid Texts are strikingly similar to those
described across the world by tribal shamans.

There are many ways for shamans to become entranced, which include whirling,
dancing, drumming and pushing the mind and body beyond the limit through
induced pain. All of these techniques produce some form of altered state of
consciousness, perhaps hallucinations, certainly an apparent physical
deadness and mental and spiritual alertness. But it must be said that the
most favoured way of inducing shamanic trance is through the use of
psychoactive drugs.

Jeremy Narby spent a lot of time researching the shamans of the Amazonian
rain forest, in particular their use of ayahuasca. Narby himself took
ayahuasca and, although at first it made him violently sick, he then entered
into the sacred trance state, where he had a particularly significant
vision.

He encountered two giant serpents who talked with him. They told him that he
was 'only a human being', which humbled him. He later said that they induced
thoughts that he wasn't then capable of having himself. All of this made him
examine his Western arrogance and preconceptions about life and humanity's
place in the scheme of things, which led directly to him writing his
ground-breaking book. As we will see, the serpents are very important. For
now, suffice it to say that Narby's own experience showed that the shamanic
state can provide otherwise inaccessible knowledge and an entirely different
way of looking at things.

We asked Narby whether he thought that his theory about the shamanic
acquisition of knowledge could apply to ancient Egypt. He replied that he
was reluctant to comment on this, as it was outside his area of specialism,
but he did suggest that if we could establish that they used drugs for
sacred purposes, this would make a strong connection with the shamanic
cultures.

To be honest we didn't know then whether such drugs were used in ancient
Egypt, but by an amazing piece of synchronicity virtually the next day there
was a Channel 4 programme in the Sacred Weeds series about the possible use
of the blue waterlily as a psychoactive drug in ancient Egypt.

In fact, it has long been recognised that the blue lily was important to the
Egyptians, because it was depicted in many wall paintings and papyri. It
even forms the design of the pillars of the Temple of Karnak. Egyptologists
believe that it was so popular simply because it is very pretty. There are
many pictures of virtually naked young ladies in party settings with blue
lilies stuck - often a bit askew - into their headdresses or belts. In fact,
the blue lily is so often associated with party scenes that some researchers
were led to wonder if they were, in fact, not merely pretty, but
recreational drugs.

The programme set out to test the properties of the blue lily and, yes, it
does have a psychoactive effect, although Channel 4 erred on the side of
caution and only used a very mild dose on its volunteers. However, we have
every reason to believe that the ancient Egyptians probably had no such
scruples. At the end of the programme, one of the contributors, the
historian Michael Carmichael, said that in larger quantities the blue lily
could be used to induce shamanic trances.

It is, perhaps, significant that the blue lily was sacred to Atum, the god
of Heliopolis.

We contacted Michael Carmichael and discussed the whole subject. He said
that the ancient Egyptians are known to have used many drugs, includinbg
opium, mandrake and cannabis. Carmichael had made a specific study of all
this, but had not heard of Jeremy Narby's work, although he had come to
virtually the same conclusions about the acquisition of knowledge while in
shamanic trance.

We ought to say at this point that we are not in any way encouraging drug
taking. It must be pointed out that shamans are highly trained and
experienced in their techniques. Don't think that we can just take some drug
or another and we'll all have extraordinary shamanic visions. We won't.
We'll get very ill, perhaps suffer psychological problems, and maybe even
die. There are no shortcuts to enlightenment.

And there are other dangers apart from the physical ones. Not all the
entities encountered in visions are benevolent. Many are tricksters, bent on
deceiving the untrained and unwary. Shamans know how to recognise them and
outwit them. Untrained people can be misled, or even possessed.

So, we know that it is possible for people to acquire advanced,
sophisticated knowledge direct from some source. Is this how the ancient
Egyptians discovered, for example, how to build the pyramids, or the secrets
of the cosmos?

In fact, we may, paradoxically, be able to deduce that this is so from the
things that the ancient Egyptians didn't know. Remember, the Amazonian
shamans get specific answers to specific questions, no less, but certainly
no more than they ask for.

The Egyptians, for all their advanced building techniques, had no concept of
the arch. The arch is a particularly efficient way of distributing weight,
compared to straight lintels. However, building with an arch requires a
conceptual leap and an understanding of weight distribution. Perhaps this
also accounts for the fact that the ancient Egyptians did not build large
bridges.

There is more evidence that they had no understanding of the intricacies of
weight distribution. Recently, French Egyptologist Jean Kerisel argued that
the cracks in the ceiling of the King's Chamber in the Great Pyramid were
not, as generally believed, caused by an earthquake at some point in the
monument's long history, but actually happened while it was being built.
This was because the builders did not appreciate the consequences of
juxtaposing granite and limestone, which compress at different rates.
Despite all the wonders of the construction of the Great Pyramid - the
quarrying, transportation, shaping and placing of such mammoth blocks of
stone - the builders made a simple technical error that would be avoided by
any modern student of architecture. Everything about the ancient Egyptians
is practise, not theory.

It is as if they were given specific answers to specific qeustions, just as
the Amazonian shamans are.

It might seem a big leap from building the pyramids to understanding the
properties of plants but we argue that the both skills came were the result
of the same process. We do not know the limits of the knowledge that can be
acquired the shaman's way. Could it, for example, include techniques for
quarrying and shifting huge blocks of stone? Could it include information
about distant stars and the origins of the cosmos?

In our previous talk we looked at the mysterious knowledge of the West
African Dogon tribe about the Sirius star system, which Robert Temple
believes results from actual contact with beings from that system. But could
their knowledge have been acquired using the shamanic technique, by asking
the spirits about the brightest star in the sky? There are clear shamanistic
aspects of the Dogon religion and mythology. For example, the gods of the
Dogon are pairs of twins, which is a common theme of shamanism the world
over.

All tribal cultures use the skills of shamans, but does this mean that it is
a primitive practise, something that a society grows out of as it becomes
more sophisticated? In the Amazon, it is true that the shamans only give
information that is necessary for day to day survival. But what would happen
if shamanism continued to exist as a culture became more organised and
sophisticated? What would be the limits of the knowledge that its shamans
could gather?

What if the Egyptians had built shamanism into their advanced culture? Could
they have taken their quest for knowledge to new levels? Could the
priesthood of Heliopolis have been, in effect, a college of shamans?

The big question is, who or what bestows this information? Are the entities,
the spirits or gods real or some kind of dramatisation of the shamans'
subconscious? Does the shaman actually go somewhere on his visionary flight,
or is it 'all in the mind'? The whole subject of otherworld reality is a
very complex one that has received little scientific or academic attention,
but which is now beginning to attract serious study at last. In the final
analysis we just don't know the answers, but at least some people are
beginning to phrase the questions.

Jeremy Narby has made a hugely thought-provoking suggestion. We have seen
that he identified certain common elements in shamanism worldwide. There is
the theme of the twin gods and serpents as bringers of wisdom - often
combined in the form of twin serpents who impart great secrets. Nrby himself
encountered two giant snakes when he took ayahuasca.

There is also the theme of the twisting rope ladder or the twisted vine.
Another theme is that of the spirits that the shamans meet, who often claim
that they are in some way present in every living thing - that they are life
itself...

It occurred to Narby from that statement that those common images of twin
serpents and twisted ladders are descriptions of the DNA double helix. In
fact, if straightened out the strands of DNA would look exactly like a rope
ladder.

What Narby suggests is that the shaman is, in some way, communicating with
his own DNA, and this is where he is getting the information from. This may
sound bizarre, but it must be remembered that we do not know the function of
97% of DNA, which science terms 'junk DNA', but which Narby suggests we call
'mystery DNA'. All the diversity of life is accounted for by just 3% of DNA,
so it seems inconceivable that the other 97% has no function. But what could
it do?

Narby goes further. He points out that it is known that DNA in one cell
actually exchanges signals with the DNA in other cells. He suggests that,
once someone taps into their own DNA, it can then communicate across
organisms, across species - even across the boundary between animal and
plant - and that the totality of all the DNA in the world forms a kind of
matrix. Perhaps this could explain phenomena such as telepathy and ESP.

The DNA in one cell transmits and receives signals from DNA in other cells.
This is done by emitting photons - that is, they actually exchange signals
in the form of light, oddly at a wavelength that is visible to humans.
Perhaps this is where we get the concept of being 'enlightened' from, and it
could be a literal description of the 'Light' of Gnosticism.

It is early days for the DNA theory, but, in our view, it has a lot going
for it. What is certain is that shamans acquire knowledge direct from some
source without any process of trial and error. It is knowledge that they
didn't have before, useful knowledge which we cannot explain - and which is
often more advanced than ours. This is something that is happening right
now, and there is no suggestion of visitors from lost continents or
spaceships landing.

We have called our book The Stargate Conspiracy, which some take to be a
reference to the movie and the TV series. In fact, it is very largely a
reference to the ancient Egyptian word sba which means both 'star' and
'gateway'. Unlike the concept of the movie, in which there is a physical
portal through which you can step up to meet the space gods, we suggest that
the real stargate is much, much closer to home. It is probably even within
each cell of our bodies. Perhaps in seeking wisdom from gurus and those with
secret agendas we are actually moving away from enlightenment. Perhaps we
should just recognise that not only the stargate, but also the gods are
within us all.


320pp, ISBN 0 316 64861 2



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HIJACKING THE GODS
Ancient Egypt, the Monuments of Mars, and Extraterrestrial Contact
Exclusive extract from a lecture by
LYNN PICKNETT and CLIVE PRINCE
at the Templar Lodge Hotel, Gullane, near Edinburgh, Scotland
6th June 1999

It was very surprising set of circumstances that led us to write our new
book, The Stargate Conspiracy. We did not set to write such a book. Rather,
we intended to pursue certain lines of research following on from our last
book, The Templar Revelation, in which we concluded that Christianity was an
off-shoot of the Egyptian mystery religion of Isis and Osiris. In that book,
we only took the story back to the Egypt of the first century. It was our
intention to extend the research further back into the history of Egypt and
the roots of its religion.

Our research led us back to the most ancient religion known from ancient
Egypt, that of Heliopolis, whose beliefs and cosmology, which are
encapsulated in the Pyramid Texts, inspired the builders of the Great
Pyramid of Giza. Inevitably, we were drawn into considering the mysteries
posed by the great monuments of the Pyramid Age. And, of course, we could
not ignore the recent flood of high-profile books dealing with, and offering
solutions to, those mysteries, which make up what has been called
'alternative Egyptology'.

Throughout the 1990s, many books, challenging the arrogance and complacency
of academic Egyptology and opening our eyes to the wonders of that ancient
culture, have reached a huge audience world-wide. In this field, two names
stand out above the rest: Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval, authors -
jointly and separately - of such books as The Orion Mystery, Fingerprints of
the Gods, Keeper of Genesis and, most recently, The Mars Mystery.

It was looking at these new theories and ideas that led our research in a
very unexpected direction, and which led ultimately to The Stargate
Conspiracy.

We need to make a very important point at the outset. Much of what we are
about to say is critical of some of these new ideas, and you may even begin
to suspect that we are, in some way, sceptics. This is not so. We believe
that there are genuine mysteries about ancient Egypt - such as how (and why)
they built the pyramids, where their civilisation came from, and how they
knew many of the things that they knew. We are not admirers of the obstinate
arrogance of academic Egyptology, and have enormous reverence for ancient
Egypt, its culture and religion, and the achievements of its people. It is
precisely because we have such reverence that we feel so strongly about the
way that the very real mysteries of Egypt have, effectively, been hijacked
in order to serve other agendas.

Where there is a mystery there is the potential for exploitation, by
offering apparent solutions that support particular systems of belief. This
potential is even stronger when the mystery involves something as evocative
as ancient Egypt, whose works, such as the pyramids and Sphinx, speak so
powerfully to our imaginations.

The Alternative Egyptology tries to explain the enigma of the advanced
technical knowledge of the ancient Egyptians - as displayed most obviously
in the building of the Great Pyramid - by one of two theories (or sometimes
a combination of the two). The first is that the ancient Egyptians were
merely an off-shoot, or heirs, of a much older, advanced civilisation - such
as Atlantis - which has been erased from history by some global catastrophe.
The second is that the great monuments of the ancient world were either
built by, or the skills to build them taught by, visitors from another
world.

One of the most influential of books in this field is The Sirius Mystery by
Robert Temple, which was first published in 1976 and in an extensively
updated edition in 1998. As many of you will know, it homes in on the
extraordinary knowledge of a West African tribe, the Dogon of Mali. The
Dogon religion centres on the star Sirius. There is nothing unusual about
that because, as Sirius is the brightest star in the sky, many cultures have
incorporated it into their beliefs and mythology. However, what intrigued
Temple - and many others - was that French anthropologists who studied the
Dogon religion reported that they also believed that Sirius has a companion
- a very small and very heavy star that is invisible to the naked eye.

We now know that this is true. Sirius is a binary star system, with a
second, white dwarf star - very small, very heavy - in orbit around the main
star. Sirius B, as it is called, was only discovered in 1842, and it was not
photographed until the 1970s. How, then, could the Dogon have known about
it?

Temple's theory is that the knowledge of Sirius B originated from actual
contact with extraterrestrials from a planet in the Sirius system. He argues
that this contact took place, not in West Africa, but in the Middle East,
among the ancient civlisations of Egypt and Sumer, and that the
extraterrestrials were responsible for the development of those
civilisations - and therefore, ultimately, of our own. The knowledge of that
contact, and of Sirius B, was incorporated into Egyptian and Sumerian
mythology, and the secret was passed on to the Greeks, and then to various
other cultures, eventually reaching the Dogon.

Because of its apparently academic and scholarly approach, Temple's book
received a level of critical acclaim and acceptance that set it apart from
other 'ancient astronaut' theories, such as those of Erich von Daniken. .

The anomalous knowledge of the Dogon - not just about Sirius, but many other
things - does present a genuine mystery. However, Temple was keen to link
this with ancient Egypt, and here, in our view, his case is less than
persuasive, as major parts of his argument are based on factual errors, and
are often contrived.

For example, one of the key points in his case involves the interpretation
of myths connected with Anubis, the jackal-headed god of the dead. His
justification for this is that Sirius is known as the 'Dog Star', so, by a
process of ideas we go from dog to jackal to Anubis. Therefore, when the
ancient Egyptians spoke about Anubis they were really talking about Sirius,
or rather Sirius B.

But there is a major problem with this - the ancient Egyptians did not
associate Sirius with Anubis. For them, Sirius was the star of the goddess
Isis, and sometimes, by extension, her son Horus. It was the Greeks who
called Sirius the Dog Star, because it was in the constellation that they
named the Great Dog (Canis Major). The Egyptians never made a connection
between Sirius and either Anubis or dogs. Therefore, Temple's use of legends
connected with Anubis is based on an entirely false premise.

Another chain of associations followed by Temple relates to the Hermetic
literature - the magical and philosophical texts ascribed to the legendary
sage Hermes Trismegistus - which he believes incorporates references to the
'Sirius secret'. His justification for doing so is that - he says - the
Greeks equated their god Hermes with Anubis.

Amazingly, Temple has (as far as we are aware) gone unchallenged on this
point for more than twenty years - because it is just plain wrong. Hermes
was the equivalent of the Egyptian Thoth, not Anubis. Once again, Temple has
based an entire line of reasoning on a mistake. But such is his influence
that many people have simply accepted it.

There are many similar examples in Temple's book, which in our view
seriously undermine his attempt to trace the 'Sirius secret' - and therefore
the visitation of beings from Sirius - back to ancient Egypt.

Temple makes another mistake in The Sirius Mystery, which is a small slip in
itself, and of no particular significance to his argument, but which does -
as we will see - have some very important ramifications in another context.

Temple gives as one of the ancient Egyptian names for the Sphinx of Giza the
words arq ur. Many others, using Temple as their authority, have since
repeated this as fact. Unfortunately, arq ur does not mean 'Sphinx'. It
means 'silver'. The mistake arose because Temple misread the entry for arq
ur in Sir E.A. Wallis Budge's classic 1920 dictionary of Egyptian
hieroglyphs.

Against the entry for arq ur, two English words appear after the
hieroglyphs. One is 'silver', the correct definition. The other reads
'Sphinx, 2, 8'. This is not a definition, but a reference to Budge's source,
a French Egyptological journal called Sphinx. The '2' refers to the volume,
and '8' the page number. On page 8 of volume 2 are the hieroglyphs for
'silver' that Budge used in his dictionary.

This mistake does not carry any particular significance for Temple's overall
argument, as he mentions it only in passing - but it does turn up in some
very surprising places.

The revised edition of The Sirius Mystery, published last year, contains
some significant new material.

In the original 1976 edition, Temple only argued the case for
extraterrestrial contact in the ancient past. In the new edition he has
extended his argument to the imminent return of these 'space-gods'. He now
believes that they did not return home to the Sirius system, but placed
themselves in suspended animation somewhere in our solar system, so that one
day they would awaken and return to see how the civilisation that they
created has developed. Temple suggests that their return is now imminent.

Also in the new edition, Temple claims that The Sirius Mystery attracted the
unwelcome interest of both the CIA and the British intelligence services. In
fact, he says that the CIA tried to interfere with his research while he was
writing the book, and that after it came out they persecuted him for the
next 15 years.

The implication is that the CIA wanted to hinder Temple's research for The
Sirius Mystery, which in turn implies that they wanted to stop him writing
the book - which implies that, for some reason, they didn't want us to read
it.

There is no doubt that Temple is being sincere, as he can by no means be
called a paranaoic with a fear of persecution by the CIA. He tells the story
of their harrassment with some indignation - since he is himself a staunch
supporter and defender of that agency. For example, in a 1989 book about the
'uses and abuses' of hypnosis, he defends the CIA's excesses in their
notorious mind control research of the 1950s and 60s, as exemplified most
infamously in their MKULTRA project. In fact, Temple proudly proclaims that
he refused even to read books exposing these experiment.

However, if the CIA did want to stop The Sirius Mystery from being
published, this is hardly a good advertisement for their efficiency.
Similarly, the implication that the CIA persecuted him for the next 15 years
because he had written the book does not make much sense. What was the
point, if the book was already out? Not only that, but they also failed to
prevent him publishing a new, updated version - which includes the story of
their interest in the book.

In fact, the knowledge of their interest in, and apparent opposition to, The
Sirius Mystery only adds to its appeal. It actively encourages interest in
the book, on the grounds that, if the CIA don't want us to read it, there
must be something worth reading. We suspect that this was the CIA's real
intention, in a classic example of reverse psychology.

The above examples of mistakes in Temple's book demonstrate the need for
careful checking of such claims. As researchers, this is something that we
always try to do. And it was something that we did when we looked into the
work of the two major names in Alternative Egyptology, Robert Bauval and
Graham Hancock.

As most of you will know, Hancock and Bauval's work centres on the
importance of the year 10500 BC. Around this time, they argue, some
cataclysm took place that destroyed an advanced, global civilisation. Some
of its knowledge survived and formed the basis of the ancient Egyptian
civilisation. They also argue that the survivors left us messages encoded in
such monuments as the pyramids and Sphinx of Giza.

On the face of it, this seems an exciting and even reasonable idea. But
let's examine their evidence more closely.

In The Orion Mystery (1993), Robert Bauval argues that the three pyramids of
Giza were built to mirror the three stars of Orion's Belt. This, in itself,
is fine - it seems to work. But Bauval uses his 'Giza-Orion Correlation
Theory' to link the monuments to a much more ancient period.

His argument is this. The three pyramids form an angle of 45 degrees to the
north-south meridian. To make the correlation perfect, when the stars cross
the celestial meridian they should form the same angle. However, when the
Great Pyramid was built - in approximately 2500 BC - they didn't. Because of
the precession of the equinoxes, the position of the stars changes over
time. Bauval reasoned that if he could find a period at which the stars
formed the same angle as the pyramids, this would pinpoint a significant
time - a time to which the pyramid-builders were trying to draw our
attention. When he used computer simulations to wind back the precessional
cycle, he found that Orion's Belt was in the 'Giza position' in 10500 BC.

However, when we decided to double check this, things took a rather
surprising turn. We discovered that the geometrician Robin J. Cook, who
actually produced the diagrams for The Orion Mystery, although agreeing with
most of Bauval's theory, strongly disagreed with this part of Bauval's
conclusions. We decided to check for ourselves to find out who was right.

We found that the Belt stars were not in the 'Giza position' in 10500 BC. To
find the stars in this position - according to the same computer program
used by Bauval - we have to go back to about 12000 BC at the earliest.

It seems that Bauval had simply made a mistake, and miscaculated by a couple
of thousand years. However, we will come back to this...

Probably the most famous development concerning ancient Egypt in the last
ten years has been the redating of the Sphinx by the erosion of the
limestone out of which it has been carved.

According to conventional Egyptology, the Sphinx was carved out of the Giza
plateau somewhere around 2500 BC. However, many - most notably leading
alternative Egyptologist John Anthony West - maintained that it is, in
reality, far older.

West believed that the erosion of the Sphinx was not caused by the action of
wind-blown sand, but by water. He believed that this was due to a great
flood - the flood that drowned Atlantis - and argued that if this could be
proven scientifically, this would be an important step in not only
establishing the true age of the Egyptian civilisation, but also the
existence of Atlantis. Eventually, he succeeded in getting American
geologist Robert Schoch to take a look.

Shoch concluded that the erosion was due to water - centuries of exposure to
rain water. But, as he pointed out, if this was the case, the Sphinx must
have been there during the last period of substantial rainfall in Egypt,
which occurred between about 7000 and 5000 BC. This means that the Sphinx
must be at least 2,500, and perhaps as much as 5,000, years older than
Egyptologists will admit.

John Anthony West claims that Schoch's work vindicates his ideas. However,
it needs to be pointed out that West believed that a flood was reponsible
for the erosion - and that, by finding that it was actually due to prolonged
exposure to rainwater, Schoch has proven him just as wrong as he has the
academic Egyptologists.

Schoch concluded that the Sphinx could have been built as long ago as 7000
BC. However, both West and Graham Hancock have used his work in support of a
much earlier date - 10500 BC. They have been so succesful in this that many
people now regard this as virtually proven.

West and Hancock argue that the wet period pinpointed by Schoch was not long
enough to cause the erosion we see on the Sphinx. Instead, they point to a
wet period that, they say, happened in the eleventh millennium BC - that is,
around 10500 BC. Graham Hancock writes in Fingerprints of the Gods that at
this time 'it rained and rained and rained.'

Imagine our surprise when we checked the sources on the climate of ancient
and prehistoric Egypt - including the source cited by Hancock himself - and
found that there was no wet period in the eleventh millennium BC.

Like Robert Bauval, Hancock and West appear to have made a simple mistake -
but one that also happens to come out at the date of 10500 BC.

In his recent book Heaven's Mirror, co-authored with his wife Santha Faiia,
and in the accompanying Channel 4 television series, Hancock has extended
his argument in favour of that date to other ancient monuments around the
world - for example, the complex of Hindu temples at Angkor in Cambodia.
(Although these do not really qualify as ancient, as the earliest was built
in the eleventh century AD.)

Hancock argues that these temples were laid out to represent the
constellation of Draco - in the position in which it was found in 10500 BC.
However, when we looked into this we found that there really is no
correlation between the temples and the stars. There are temples which do
not correspond to any of the stars of Draco, stars for which there is no
corresponding temple - and, in any case, the pattern formed by the temples,
as reconstructed by Hancock,  bears very little resemblance to Draco.

It seems that Hancock, Bauval and West are, for some reason, keen to make
sure that their research pinpoints the year 10500 BC - whether or not the
data actually fits.

But why 10500 BC?

Perhaps it is connected with the prophecies of the American psychic Edgar
Cayce - for whom Hancock and Bauval seem to have a great deal of respect.

Edgar Cayce, known as the 'Sleeping Prophet', who died in 1945, is widely
believed to be a simple, uneducated Kentucky man, who entered a trance state
and made pronouncements about the ancient past as well as giving predictions
for the future. According to Cayce, the Great Pyramid and Sphinx were built
by survivors from Atlantis - in 10500 BC. He said that the Atlanteans had
built an underground 'Hall of Records' that contains the collected wisdom of
their race and which, he said, would be discovered in 1998. This would
somehow trigger a New Age, and the emergence of a new race.

We spent a lot of time looking at Cayce's predictions - and found that,
despite the fact that his followers claim that he was 'close to one hundred
per cent accurate', you would be hard pressed to find even one of his
prophecies that has come true.

For example, recently someone told us that Cayce was a brilliant prophet
because, in the early 1940s, he predicted that China would become Communist
by 1968. Of course, if true, that would be impressive. Unfortunately, what
Cayce actually said was that China would become Christian by 1968.

But even so Cayce is extremely interesting. Far from being a virtual
simpleton, he was extremely widely read, and as a young man worked in
several bookstores. He was also entrusted with setting up new lodges for his
fellow Freemasons. But more significant than that were his contacts.

We discovered that, just after the First World War, Cayce was called in to
advise President Woodrow Wilson. The person who arranged this was a close
friend of Cayce's, Colonel Edmond Starling, who was head of the US Secret
Service.

Cayce was best known for the cures that he prescribed while in trance, which
were often genuinely impressive. This is what hooked his admirers, who made
the fatal error of assuming that all his psychic abilities were just as
good. However, as we have seen, it turns out that this is not the case. But
people at the time did not know that his predictions would fail, and he was
feted by leading industrialists, top politicians - including at least one
President - senior Army commanders, and members of the intelligence
services.

Cayce, as we have seen, predicted the finding of the Hall of Records at
Giza. It is interesting that there have been many attempts to find the Hall
of Records there in the last 25 years. It needs to be pointed out that the
ancient Egyptians themselves never mentioned any such thing in the context
of Giza, nor is there any archaeological evidence for it. The concept of the
Hall of Records comes entirely from Edgar Cayce.

As we would expect, the prime movers in the search for the Hall of Records
have been the Association for Research and Enlightenment (ARE), which was
formed by Cayce in the 1930s and continues to promote his work.

Other key players on the Giza plateau (sometimes working in collaboration
with ARE) have been a team from a very interesting organisation called SRI
International. This is one of the world's biggest private scientific
research institutes, and it has a reputation - which we discovered is
justified - for working closely with the American military and intelligence
community. Around 75 per cent of SRI's income comes from contracts with the
Pentagon and other US government agencies, including the CIA.

SRI made many expeditions to Egypt during the 1970s, taking with it
state-of-the-art equipment designed to locate hidden chambers. The team was
led by physicist Dr Lambert Dolphin Jr. But it is interesting that they gave
up looking at Giza in 1979, apparently without having found anything.
However, since then the mystique of the Hall of Records has continued to be
built up, so that there is an expectation of revelations coming from Egypt
in the near future.

Now that 1998 - when Cayce said the Hall of Records would be found - has
passed, rumours are beginning to circulate that it was found in the form of
the so-called Tomb of Osiris. This is a chamber at the bottom of a shaft
some 120 feet beneath the Giza plateau not far from the Sphinx, which was
re-excavated last year. It has no records of any kind in it, and yet
attempts are being made to pass this off as somehow confirming Cayce's
prophecy. In any case, it was first excavated in the 1930s.

The point is that, if any of these people find something that might be a
Hall of Records, it will be taken as proof that Cayce was right not only
about his version of ancient history, but also in his predictions of
imminent global transformation. But you can be sure that, if the year 2000
comes and goes without any Hall of Records, the same people will continue to
exploit the increasingly fervent longing for it to be found.

Make no mistake: Egypt itself is a very potent symbol. This has not escaped
those that deal in the exploitation of belief systems - such as the
intelligence agencies.

Another emotive issue is the whole question of life on other planets, and
recently we have seen a concerted effort to connect ancient Egypt with a
putative lost civilisation on Mars, as for example, in Hancock and Bauval's
1998 book The Mars Mystery.

Everybody will be familiar with the so-called Face on Mars and Pyramids of
Mars, features of an area of known as Cydonia that some argue can only be
artificial. They were discovered in photographs taken by the Viking mission
in 1976.

Their most enthusiastic exponent is science writer Richard C. Hoagland.
Since the early 1980s, Hoagland has run a well-funded group which is
currently called the Enterprise Mission. Although there are other, more
cautious, researchers in this field whose work deserves serious
consideration, Hoagland and his team's primary aim is not simply to promote
the idea of artificial structures on Mars, but to extrapolate from their
existence a message for Earth today - and for our immediate future. They
also try to link the alleged monuments of Cydonia to ancient Egypt.
Hoagland's own message is that the Martian monuments were built by an
extraterrestrial civilisation that came from outside our solar system, who
also visited ancient Egypt and influenced the development of that
civilisation - and who are about to return.

Unfortunately for Hoagland, the so-called Face was re-imaged by the Mars
Global Surveyor last year, and shown to be nothing more than a featureless
rocky outcrop. Dismissing the new pictures as 'crap', Hoagland is
unrepentant and continues to maintain the Egypt-Mars connection.

And in this Hancock and Bauval agree. To them also there is a link between
Mars and Egypt. Those authors use many of the same arguments as Hoagland to
try to prove the link. (Robert Temple, in the new edition of The Sirius
Mystery, has also endorsed the Face on Mars, believing it to be connected
with beings from Sirius.)

We ourselves think that the Mars story is by no means clear-cut. For
example, the Pyramids of Cydonia do seem strange for natural formations. On
the data currently available, it would be arrogant to dismiss the case for
them being artificial. However, we do disagree when it comes to
extrapolating messages from these features and trying to link them with
ancient Egypt. Here, we find that the arguments put forward simply do not
stand up.

Essentially the argument is this - and it's not much: there are pyramids on
Mars and there are pyramids in Egypt. But, of course, there are pyramids in
many places on Earth, and the Martian pyramids are different in shape - the
most prominent one, for example, is five-sided - and size from those in
Egypt.

Hoagland, Hancock and Bauval also argue that Giza and Mars do not only have
pyramids in common - but both also have a Sphinx! This depends on whether
you consider the Martian Face to be a Sphinx. Well, they both have faces...

Then they fall back on linguistics - or rather, as we have discovered,
pseudo-linguistics. For example, Hoagland, Hancock and Bauval make much of
one of the ancient Egyptian names of the Sphinx, Horakhti, which means
'Horus of the Horizon'. They claim that there are two ancient Egyptian
words, one meaning 'Horus' and the other meaning 'face', that sound exactly
alike: heru. So Horakhti, they say, can be translated as 'Face of the
Horizon'. Could this be a description of the Face on Mars, which would be on
the horizon when viewed from some of the other features?

Well. no. For a start, the thing that none of these authors tell us is that
heru is a plural form of the word for 'face', so it actually means 'faces'.
Besides, the hieroglyphs for the two words are completely different. In any
case, because hieroglyphs don't include vowels, which therefore have to be
largely guessed at, how can anybody say that any two ancient Egyptian words
sounded alike?

Another linguistic loophole involves the Arab name for Cairo - Al Qahira.
This is also an Arab name for Mars. Not only is this fact used to link Giza
and Cydonia, but Hancock and Bauval actually say that this is
'inexplicable'. But far from being inexplicable, the reason that Cairo was
given this name is, in fact, very well known. Al Qahira literally means 'the
Conqueror'. The city of Cairo did not exist before 969 AD, when it was
founded by an Arab general who had just conquered that part of Egypt. True,
Mars does come into it, but only because at the time the city was founded
the planet was in a particularly auspicious position astrologically -
especially for a city built in honour of a conqueror. There is no mystery
about it - but Hoagland, Hancock and Bauval have made one.

There appears to be a genuine mystery about Mars. Perhaps there really are
pyramids or other artificial structures there. However, attempts to link
Cydonia with ancient Egypt simply don't work and have been contrived. But
for what purpose?

Perhaps a clue lies in the fact that Richard Hoagland was working at SRI
International when he first became interested in the Martian enigmas in
1982. He formed a research group to study them further, which was funded by
SRI. The co-founder of this group was Dr Lambert Dolphin, who a few years
earlier had led the SRI teams at Giza.

In case you think that we are overly paranoid about SRI's intimate
involvement with the Pentagon and CIA, it is as well to take on board the
initial reaction of one social scientist who attended Hoagland's first
lecture on the Face on Mars. What he said was:

'At first I thought it was some kind of joke, or maybe a complex social
experiment being conducted by the CIA - to study psychological reactions to
such a hypothetical discovery. I mean - SRI involvement, 'Faces' on Mars...
what would you think?... Was this an elaborate psychological experiment
sponsored by the defense community?'

In fact, Hoagland's work has always received active encouragement by members
of the intelligence community, and most of the key members of his research
groups have connections with either intelligence agencies or the Pentagon.



All of this is really, in a sense, just setting the scene for the 'stargate
conspiracy', at the heart of which are revelations about a very interesting
group of people.

Nearly fifty years ago, this American group believed that they had
established contact with powerful extraterrestrial beings. Not physical
contact, but psychic or telepathic communication. Over a period of many
years these entities made many revelations about themselves - including that
they had been the gods worshipped in ancient Egypt.

Let's make this clear. We are not talking about a little New Age channelling
group. From the very beginning - half a century ago - it reached the very
top levels of American society, even involving a former Vice President.
Since then its influence has grown, and it now has followers across the
world, including in Britain. And it still whispers in the ear of the
Presidency.

So what do these entities, or intelligences, claim?

They claim that they come from Sirius. They built the 'monuments' of Mars
(although, significantly, these claims only appeared after the first NASA
images of Cydonia.) They created the human race, and taught it the arts of
civilisation, and have guided us from behind the scenes throughout history.

And they are now about to return to preside over a great 'cleansing'.

They claim to have been responsible for the destruction of Atlantis, after
which survivors founded the Egyptian civilisation and built the Great
Pyramid - around the year 10500 BC. They claim that the Sphinx was built in
honour of them - and that there are hidden chambers that can be accessed
from beneath it.

Some of those who claim to be in contact with these extraterrestrials also
claim to have been in contact with Edgar Cayce's spirit guide, and that
Cayce's pronouncements came from essentially the same source.

In its fifty-year history, the 'contact group' in touch with these entities
have had some very interesting dealings. During the early 1970s, it was
intimately involved with SRI International - interestingly, at the same time
that SRI first became interested in Giza. In fact, one of the leaders of
this group worked alongside Lambert Dolphin's team.

Key members of this group have been behind the promotion of the Face on Mars
- and its connection with Egypt - from the very beginning. In fact, Richard
Hoagland's so-called Message of Cydonia comes directly from these
'space-gods'.

Throughout its long history, many eminent names have been connected with
this group - names from the fields of politics, high finance, entertainment,
and even science.

Among those present at the 'first contact' with these alleged
extraterrestrials in 1952 was the philosopher and inventor Arthur M. Young -
who was later to become the mentor of Robert Temple, and who directly
inspired him to write The Sirius Mystery.

Put like this it all sounds very exciting. Has contact with the gods of
ancient Egypt been re-established? Are they, as they promise, about to
return?

Of course, many would consider their claims to have been backed up by
independent research: the connection between Sirius and ancient Egypt; the
importance of the year 10500 BC; the connection between Egypt and Mars. But
we have seen that all this 'evidence' is not only flawed but highly
contrived.

It must be pointed out that these allegedly all-knowing entities not only
make mistakes when dealing with ancient history, but sometimes come out with
downright howlers. They even give the ancient Egyptian name for the Sphinx
as arq ur - which, as we have seen, comes from a misreading of a particular
dictionary.

But the whole story takes on a much darker hue. We have discovered that
military and intelligence agencies, mainly the CIA, were involved with this
group right from the beginning. In fact, the research institute where the
entities first made their appearance was actually a front for Pentagon
psychological warfare and parapsychological experiments.

The person who formed and led the 'contact group', and who first established
contact with the entities, was - at the very same time - working for both
the Pentagon and the CIA on various techniques of psychological
manipulation. This included the use of hallucinogenic drugs, hypnosis and
electromagnetic influence. He was working specifically on ways to induce
apparent mental contact with non-human entities - and, much more
disturbingly, this was part of the CIA's MKULTRA mind control project.

We have seen the involvement of the CIA in much of this story. But how far
does it go?

Did they create this scenario from the beginning, as part of a long-term
programme of psychological and sociological manipulation?

Or could it really be that some non-human entities - but not necessarily who
they claim to be - are either running the show or are partners in its stage
management?

Either way, it should scare the hell out of us...


Release date 1st July 1999, 320pp, ISBN 0 316 64861 2



----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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By The Same Authors


The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ
by Lynn Picknett & Clive Prince

In the course of their investigations into Leonardo da Vinci and the Turin
Shroud, Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince were struck by clues in the work of
the great Renaissance artist and scientist that seemed to point to the
existence of a secret underground religion. Guided by hints about that
religion's continued existence, they found further clues in a twentieth
century church in London.

These were just the beginnings of a quest that was to lead the authors
through time and space to the heartland of European occultism and the dark
histories of such mysterious bodies as the Freemasons, the Cathars and the
Knights Templar.

As they dug beyond what was already known, the trail led them to the ideas
and beliefs of the first century AD and a devastating new view of the real
character and motives of the supposed founder of Christianity and the role
of John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene. And in doing so they revealed a
secret history, preserved through the centuries, whose final chapter might
shatter the foundations of the Church...

These copies are signed by the authors.



ISBN 0-552-14330-8




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 © Templar Lodge Hotel 1999
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