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ALEXANDER BLAIR-EWART: Your book Serpent in the Sky is an introduction to ancient Egypt and to Schwaller de Lubicz. He's an exceptional character inside Egyptology, isn't he? He was an Alchemist to start with. J 0 H N A N T H 0 N Y W E S T : He's not an academic Egyptologist, which gives the academic Egyptologists, license to ignore him, which they do. But he's an absolutely meticulous scholar. And he doesn't stick his neck out unless he can document it with particular interpretations. The thing to realize about Egyptology is that the only facts are the temples themselves, the inscriptions and relief's, and so on. But the interpretation of those facts is by no means a scientific exercise. The proportions of the temple those are the facts. What those proportions and measurements signify are a matter of interpretation. Other Egyptologists may say they don't signify anything. The Great Pyramid just happens to be one eighth of a degree of longitude. In order to help people understand what makes Schwaller so different from all the rest, I use the analogy of Martians coming to Earth and watching a baseball game. And if they don't have any games on Mars, they can get very interested in this strange religious rite. They can measure the distance to the bases; they can even deduce some of the quite complex rules. But if you don't even recognize that it is a game, the information is total nonsense. Once you figure out that it's a game, then it all makes sense. There were a number of other scholars even within the bounds of academic Egyptology in the nineteenth century who knew that there was something going on. They knew it was a game, but they didn't know what the game was. Schwaller figured out precisely what the game was and documented it in such a way that it really is irrefutable. And it's an important game, here and now in the last few years of the twentieth century, not that we're going to build pyramids and temples of Luxor again, but rather because Egypt provides us with a tremendous picture of how civilized people actually comport themselves. A.B.E.: Why does the study of ancient Egypt continue to be important today? J.A.W.: It's because you can say there's really only one important philosophical question in the world, which is, is humanity on Earth for a purpose or not? The answer you give to that question determines the nature of an entire society. If the answer is yes, you produce Taj Mahals, Chartres cathedrals, temples of Luxor, and pyramids, etc. You produce Zen archery and Eastern martial arts and some primitive societies which aren't primitive at all, actually. You produce all kinds of dances and ceremonies, rituals and so on. If the answer to the question is no, you produce the twentieth century with its nuclear bombs and its poisoning of the earth, and the energy that would go into building cathedrals is building shopping malls. And you have a religion in its own right called the "Church of Progress." What we have now is a direct result of our having answered no, there is no purpose to our being here. A.B.E.: Very strange, this "Church of Progress." It demands a sacrifice of all of life. It's worse than the Aztecs. J.A.W.: It demands the sacrifice of your heart. Only they don't cut it out of your body. They petrify it within. So what was it about Egypt that made it so important? Precisely because it's an example of how civilized people behave when they're answering that question with, "Yes, there is a purpose to our life." And one of the ways that is acted out is in the building of these glorious temples, tombs, and art work, genius and reverence spread across an entire society. In Egypt, the whole of society was engaged in extending its creative genius on every level. A.B.E.: Can we explore Schwaller's concept of "The Temple in Man"? He, along with his wife Isha and Lucie Lamy, were at the Temple of Luxor sometime in the forties and fifties? J.A.W.: Yes, 1947 52. J.A.W.: He started out with a very simple aim. He was looking for the golden section phi. He had what psychics call a revelation, what poets call an inspiration, what scientists call a hypothesis (they always make it as boring as possible), that the Temple of Luxor was an exercise in harmony and proportion. Within a very short time he discovered not only was there the phi, but that the Egyptians were aesthetically, geometrically sophisticated in a way that he never envisioned. He had the background knowledge that allowed him to recognize what was going on. What started out as a relatively simple aim proliferated into this massive project in which the geometry and proportion, and so on, ran into a complete reinterpretation of the myths and hieroglyphs and symbolism. So he was finally able to offer this picture of a tremendously integrated civilization which hasn’t been seen on Earth since that time. Art, philosophy, science, and religion fused into one inextricable motion. A.B.E.: When was the Temple of Luxor first built? J.A.W.: Like everything else it was built upon earlier structures. The earliest parts found have been incorporated into the present structure and they date from the Middle Kingdom which is roughly 2000 B.C., but almost certainly, like every other structure in Egypt, it dates further back to the original. A.B.E.: So, approximately four thousand years ago, these human beings began to build this structure and into this structure they built a total harmonious imprint of individual man himself, the human being and his relationship to all of life. J.A.W.: And it’s curious that it is in Luxor and not in some other Temple – Dendera or wherever. Luxor was the key to the whole business. It’s a really amazing building. A.B.E.: What kind of people lived there? J.A.W.: It’s like this great genius operating on every possible level simultaneously. The proportions of the geometry, the way the relief's fit into the spaces, and the way it all fits together is absolutely mysterious. As though they thought in geometry and then could apply the relief's, the sculptures, the sanctuaries, the symbolism, and mythology to the geometry simultaneously. The deeper you go into it, the more incredible it seems. A.B.E.: These men were not like us? J.A.W.: Presumably they were like us. They were individuals. There are enough documents around to show this. They had criminals and they had lawsuits and they had wills. A.B.E.: What is it that we have lost or forgotten? J.A.W.: We seem to have lost touch with the universal principles, the living experience of the organic creation. Everybody knows the movement of birth, fertilization, growth, death, and renewal, ultimately finding spiritual resurrection and salvation. But our science of the Church of Progress finds these to be accidental corollaries. A.B.E.: There was this incredible integrated awareness and then it was lost just like that. What does that point to for us? J.A.W.: It wasn’t completely lost. It was carried on throughout the ages into Chartres and Europe. Mayan temples manifest a somewhat similar understanding in a different context. It’s written into China and Japan. It has never really been lost. What has been lost is the ability of an entire civilization to live it. A.B.E.: I'm very interested in what it was that you discovered when you were in Egypt not very long ago researching the riddle of the Sphinx.
J.A.W.: I've been working on this theory for going on twenty years now, based on Schwaller de Lubicz's very simple observation that the Sphinx was weathered by water, not by wind and sand. His theory, in my opinion, was demonstrable, and that all you needed was a geologist with the right kind of expertise to look into that question, see if it was weathered by water, and if it was, the question would then be: Where did the water come from, and when? I knew that the Sahara is a relatively recent desert, but that it's been desert at least since dynastic Egypt and before. The current dating suggests that it has been desert since about 10,000 B.C. In between 10,000 and 15,000 B.C., there were long periods of terrific rains, high floods, and all sorts of things, a very confused period. Before that it was fertile savannah. A.B.E.: Would that flood period have connected to an ice age farther north? J.A.W.: Well, the current thinking is that it was concurrent with the melting of the ice from the last ice age. But at the moment I think you can say without any hesitation whatsoever that the theory is correct. The Sphinx was weathered by water and is a hell of a lot older than anybody thinks it is, This is sure. How much older? This is where the geology starts getting fuzzy because, when you go into geology, as in any other science, the stuff that's put out there for the layman all looks as though they have all the answers. As soon as you start going into it, however, you see that everybody's arguing about it, and it's by no means hard. What seems to be hard, as it were, is the sequential chronology. In other words, though nobody can really put a date on it, it's certain that the desert comes last. Before that there was this long period of very heavy rains, and I mean "the deluge" Jumps to mind. It's very hard not to think of that in terms of Old Testament deluge. And before that it was savannah. Now that's certain. But the dating is up for grabs. I mean, from my point of view, whether it's 8000 B.C. or 14,000 B.C. or 40,000 B.C. is beside the point. The main point is that it was built by a civilization of which we have no record. And when you really look at the Sphinx and the temples around it, you see that it's an even more staggering piece of work than even the Pyramids or the temples of Egypt. So effectively it upsets the whole applecart of history. Needless to say, the people who make a living selling apples are not happy about this. A.B.E.: And now you are able to prove your theory? J.A.W.: I've got my geologist, Robert M. Shoch, backing me up on this a hundred percent. Now he's a very conservative guy, and he starts getting a bit edgy when you start bandying about dates, because we can't yet geologically put a strict date to it. But he certainly agrees with that chronological sequence. So it's fairly obvious that whenever those rains were there, the Sphinx was there before that. Oh yes, by the way, I should say that it's not just water weathering, but it's quite distinctly rain. In other words, lots of precipitation over long periods of time. This you see not so clearly on the Sphinx itself, because it has been repaired and re-repaired so many times over the past five thousand years that it's tough to get a really clear picture of the Sphinx itself. But where you get an absolutely pristine clear picture is on the stone walls of the ditch surrounding the Sphinx ... A.B.E.: In the oldest layers of stone? J.A.W.: Where it's been cut away in order to free the body of the Sphinx. And there you see that the walls have been weathered back ten twelve feet from the original cut. You see, this doesn't happen overnight. A.B.E.: What is the Sphinx made of? J.A.W.: Limestone. The technical word is "competent," a fairly competent limestone. A.B.E.: It would take a fair while to wear limestone back to that extent. Chartres and most of the cathedrals in Europe are made of limestone and some of them go back to the eleventh or twelfth century. And they're showing very mild wear at this point. J.A.W.: That's right. Again it depends a lot upon the kind of limestone. If it's a harder limestone, it's going to wear a lot less. On the other hand, Europe is Europe, and it's raining all the time. In Egypt, of course, it hardly ever rains. There is lots of hard scientific work still to be done here, but I think you can say without any possibility of doubt that all of history and the whole notion of the so called evolution of human civilization has to be rethought right from the beginning on the basis of this simple fact. A.B.E: Who do you think those people were who built the Sphinx? J.A.W.: I do not know. A.B.E.: Have you got a theory? J.A.W.: Some of my colleagues and I got to laughing about it; It’s become known as the "A" word, because as soon as you say the "A" word everybody gets all excited. [laughter] The opposition freaks out and starts getting hot under the collar. The "A" word is, of course, Atlantis and Plato's myth. A.B.E.: Through my own cosmological, cyclical investigations I was driven to the conclusion that Atlantis existed where the Mediterranean Sea is now. J.A.W.: Well, that's a very plausible scenario, because it's quite well known that the Mediterranean wasn't full not so very long ago, and that it could well be that that civilization was existing on the bottom, and that the Sphinx was sort of the outpost. Maybe the Sphinx was to that civilization what Abu Simbel was to the dynastic Egyptians. That's one scenario. A.B.E.: The thing is, how do you explain away the vast proliferation of different cultures in the Mediterranean basin, even within recorded history? Where did all those different cultures come from? J.A.W.: Again, that's a good question, and very difficult to answer, I mean, human beings are human beings; they could have all thought it up independently, more or less at the same time, the way you see it happen with scientific discoveries nowadays, where people working absolutely independently and with no knowledge of each other come up with very similar discoveries around the same time, as though it's in the air. So you just don't know; you can't answer those questions, really. But since I spoke to you last there's a new card been thrown on the table. Have you heard about the people who are working on the face on Mars, the monuments on Mars? A.B.E.: Yes. The new Mars mystery. J.A.W.: Well, they've been in touch with me, and I'd heard about that discovery, but never looked deeply into it. I've always been a bit hesitant about it because the Sphinx theories were outrageous enough to begin with. But when I peruse their material really carefully, unless the photographs or the computer enhancements are a total fudge, it sure does look interesting. A.B.E: Yeah, that huge pyramid….. J.A.W.: To me, the proof is when the geometry starts giving you those figures, because the geometry's no accident. A.B.E.: Would you describe what those Viking computer enhanced pictures show on Mars? J.A.W.: Well yes, they show something that looks very suspiciously like a gigantic face which looks up into the air. All you'd see from the ground was a profile. A huge head with a kind of headdress around it, and then, not connected, directly with it, but connected to it geometrically in other words, at quite precise distances and angles from it are a number of structures that do not look natural, including a five sided pyramid. That pyramid just doesn't look like something that could be formed naturally. The researchers, for reasons too complicated to go into, date that construction at about 200,000 B.C., and they think that the Sphinx and the Giza pyramid are connected in some way or another to that original scheme. Interestingly enough, once when we were sitting near the Sphinx, Shoch was looking at this weathering on the ditch and suddenly said, "Gee, this is scary, this stuff looks like it's hundreds of thousands of years old." The first viewing of the Sphinx is often revelatory. I mean, it really packs a wallop like nothing else on this Earth what struck me was that this dated from some kind of unimaginable antiquity, and that it was built by people so advanced beyond us that it was very hard even to conceive of what they were like, what they thought or how they felt, that it was built by superhuman beings who nevertheless ostensibly were us. And of course that was a gut feeling, that's not science. But when we talk about dates it looks so outrageous that if you have any scientific background, or you believe anything you were taught in school, you would just want to dismiss it out of hand. Yet when you go into it, even that kind of outrageous figure has to be borne in mind. I mean I'm not saying that it is that, but once you realize that the Sphinx was built before the rains, and the rains were somewhere between, say, 10,000 and 15,000 B.C., well then, it's at least older than 15,000 B.C., and it could be a hell of a lot older than that. We don't know. A.B.E.: All of the Neoplatonic cosmologies place it firmly in what we call the Atlantean epoch. J.A.W.: Yes, there are legends and myths all over the world that suggest that high civilizations were around tens of thousands of years prior to modern history. And, of course, why not listen to the ancients? I mean, it was their job to keep intact the old knowledge. If I want to know something about the Egyptians, I listen to the Egyptians rather than the Egyptologists. A.B.E.: Yes, that's really the only sane approach. J.A.W.: Quite frankly my view of modern scholarship and modern science is that it's mostly a catastrophe. There's not much of it that's right and an awful lot of it that's presumption, assumption, and opinion, and just plain hubris. So it seems, on the basis of this Sphinx theory alone, that it's time to go back and look into the old legends and myths and see what checks out, what corroborates, what cross matches, and so on. There's been a fair amount of work along these lines, which proves again, beyond any possibility of doubt, that there's an astronomical, astrological content. And then there are many of these myths and legends found all around the world that date from time immemorial. So, really, we're effectively establishing the context of an entirely new science on the basis of this very simple fact that the Sphinx was weathered by water in the distant past. A.B.E.: Incidentally, John, in the revised cosmology that I've been working on through astrology for many years, the planet that rules Egypt, or the force point in the cycle, is Mars. J.A.W.: Interesting that you say that, Alexander, because the ancient word for Giza or Cairo, apparently, to the ancient Egyptians I didn't know this myself was the name for Mars. A.B.E.: Ahh... that's beautiful. J.A.W.: So there are a lot of connections, and I'm just now starting to explore this Mars connection material. A.B.E.: Now, you may not be able to offer scientific proof, but I do want to get back to the "A" word, and back to the Sphinx. What impression do you have of the kind of people who would have built the Sphinx? J.A.W.: Well, it's hard to say. But you get a sense of a kind of superhuman quality, particularly when you took just at the scale and perfection of the Sphinx. When you look at the temples around it, built of blocks that each weigh upwards of two hundred and fifty tons, that are jig sawed into place as though they were children's toys, you get the sense of a people in command of a kind of prodigious technology that is at the same time philosophical and spiritual. And you can't took at the Sphinx without getting this tremendous feeling in your gut that you get from a tremendous work of art. A great work of art puts you in touch with the gods. That's what art is for, to put you in touch with divine or cosmic principles. We've lost track of that, of course, in our barbarous civilization which we like to call progressive. But that's what ancient art, ancient sacred art, was for. And that's what you get when you look at the Sphinx and its temples. Indeed you get it from all of Egypt, but especially from the Sphinx and the temples around it. And if you go into it deeply enough which is difficult to do with the Sphinx temples because they're so badly beaten up and weathered that it's hard to get the measurements but when you measure these things carefully you get the constituent harmonies, geometries, and proportions, and they in turn can give you clues as to the original function, which, in fact, is not known in the case of the Sphinx and its temples. Not only do we not know when the Sphinx was built, or who built it, we don't know why it was built, although the Mars guys and I have some pretty interesting speculative ideas about that. ABE: Can you talk about them? J.A.W.: Well, one of my ideas is that in some sense or another the whole complex of Giza and other similar places was intended to act as a kind of tuning fork that's meant to re-spiritualize the earth, or to spiritualize it, as the case may be; that it's kind of a gigantic, scientific religious instrument that's designed to, let's say, put people in touch with the gods, which are of course within. That's my gut feeling, but attempting to prove that is something else again. In the geometry, and in fact to a certain extent in the geology and the geomorphology, as we get into it, we're starting to find real clues. The people who are working on the Mars material came up with a somewhat similar explanation from a purely mathematical standpoint. So we’ve got something interesting going on, and it’s going to take some years to develop. I think we’ve got a variety of people with expertise – not just your usual Aquarian dreamers – but people with real expertise in very specific areas, and we seem to be converging on a kind of new science or new paradigm. A.B.E.: Does this research lend credibility to the idea that the earth at one time was populated from another planet, or that there was a time when there was a transplanetary civilization? J.A.W.: Why not ? I mean, it could just as well be the other way around, that they could have been populated from us. And, of course, also coming into this whole paradigm now are these amazing crop circles that are showing up everywhere which are demonstrating the same kind of geometry as the formations on Mars, and which is in turn connected to the geometry on the Giza plateau. [laughter] It's a bit mind boggling, but I don't mind speculation as long as you know you're being speculative, and you don't say that something is until you have some kind of real proof that it is, at least from the point of view of science. If you want to go and talk channeling and revelations, well then you don't have to talk science, and I have nothing against that. But for my purposes, in this kind of an inquiry, I do need science. A.B.E.: Where are you going to next take this investigation? J.A.W.: When we first went there we were looking for underground chambers to see if there was anything to Edgar Cayce's “hall of records” and that sort of thing. And we did, in fact, discover some rather suspicious – looking or sounding cavities and/or chambers in the area of the Sphinx. Because we were kind of casting our net wide, didn’t do detailed enough work so that we could absolutely spot them and we can’t really say on the basis of the seismograph whether they are man-made or natural structures. But they are suspiciously unnatural looking in terms of the way they are placed and the fact that soundings taken elsewhere on the plateau don’t give you those cavities or chambers. So one of the next stages would be to get back there with the seismographs and do much more detailed work so that we can pinpoint these things. If we can pinpoint them more precisely, then the Department of Antiquities would drill and drop down one of those little minicameras to see if something is there. A.B.E.: How deep are those cavities, John? J.A.W.: It was hard to tell. The impression that we got from the seismograph work was that they might have been chambers or cavities that had collapsed. So we just don't know. But a Japanese team who was there a couple of years ago, using a totally different method of underground sounding, came up with rather similar results. So there's something there. A.B.E.: Would you say that the result of your recent investigation there in Egypt on the site of the Sphinx and the surrounding temples definitely proves that the Sphinx is infinitely older than we previously thought it was? J.A.W.: Yes. Well, I wouldn't say infinitely, but it's many, many thousands of years older than anyone thought, and on that basis alone the whole of history and the notion of the so called evolution of human civilization has to be totally rethought. Yes, I can categorically say that. Copyright © A. Blair-Ewart 1995-2003.
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