The message of the Sphinx: a quest for the hidden legacy of mankind (40 page)

[134]
2 Andrew Tomas,
From Atlantis to Discovery,
Robert Hale, London 1972, p. 109.

[135]
Ibn Abd Alhokim and the Arab Manuscripts of Ibn Khurradhbih and Lohfat, cited by Joseph R. Jochmans,
The Hall of Records,
unpublished manuscript, 1985, p. 174. See also John Greaves,
Pyramidographia,
1646, translation from the Arabic of Ibn Alhokim.

[136]
Peter Tompkins,
Secrets of the Great Pyramid,
Allen Lane, 1972, p. 6.

[137]
The famous Westcar Papyrus in the (east) Berlin Museum suggests that a secret chamber or chambers were concealed in the ‘horizon’ of Cheops—i.e. the alleged builder of the Great Pyramid (See
The Orion Mystery,
op. cit., Appendix 3). The term ‘Horizon’, however, could mean either the Great Pyramid itself or the whole necropolis of Giza, thus including the Sphinx. Spell 1080 of the Coffin Texts (
c.
2000 BC) speaks of a secret ‘sealed thing’ belonging to Osiris of Rostau (Giza) and spell 1087 suggests that it was ‘writing material’ linked to Heliopolis (Djedu, the ‘Pillar City’), and hidden somewhere in the desert sands.

[138]
These Coptic traditions were recorded by the Arab chroniclers Al Qodai, Al Masudi and Al Maqrizi, cited in Jochmans,
The Hall of Records,
op. cit., p. 210.

[139]
The so-called ‘Old Charges’ of Freemasonry speak of a certain Hermenes (obviously Hermes, i.e. Thoth) who preserved the ‘crafts’ by carving their knowledge on sacred pillars or obelisks (see Fred L. Pick and G. Norman Knight,
The Pocket History of Freemasonry,
Frederick Muller Ltd., London 1983, p. 32). It is generally accepted that much of the ‘Egyptian’ esoteric strain in Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism and, to a certain extent, the Theosophists, comes from the so-called Hermetic Tradition that developed in Europe in the late Italian Renaissance but drew its source from the Greek and Coptic texts known as the Hermetic writings (see Frances A. Yates,
Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition,
University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1991; also
The Rosicrucian Enlightenment,
Ark Paperbacks, London 1986, p. 212).

[140]
Harmon Hartzell Bro,
Edgar Cayce: A Seer Out Of Season,
Signet Books, New York 1990, pp. 43-4. Cayce’s life-long secretary was Gladys Davis, described as ‘an attractive honey-blonde’, whom Cayce believed to be his ‘reincarnated’ daughter, Iso, from Atlantean times (Ibid., p. 245).

[141]
Edgar Evans Cayce, Gail Cayce Schwartzer and Douglas G. Richards,
Mysteries of Atlantis Revisited: Edgar Cayce’s Wisdom for the New Age,
Harper & Row,. San Francisco 1988, p. xxi.

[142]
Ibid. p. 119. We have had the pleasure of meeting with the author, Douglas G. Richards, in July 1995 at the Edgar Cayce Foundation in Virginia Beach.

[143]
Ibid. p. 120.

[144]
Edgar Cayce ‘Reading’ on the Great Pyramid No. 5748-6. This ‘reading’ was given at his home on Arctic Crescent, Virginia Beach, Va., on 1 July 1932 at 4.10 p.m. EST.

[145]
‘Reading’ 378-16. See Mark Lehner,
The Egyptian Heritage: Based on the Edgar Cayce Readings,
A.R.E. Press, Virginia Beach 1974, p. 99.

[146]
‘Reading’ No. 5748-6.
The Egyptian Heritage,
op. cit., p. 119.

[147]
‘Reading’ No. 294-151. See Thomas Sugrue,
There is a River: The story of Edgar Cayce,
A.R.E. Press, Virginia Beach, 1988, p. 393. See also Harmon Hartzell Bro,
A Seer Out Of Season,
op. cit., p. 247.

[148]
Mark Lehner,
The Egyptian Heritage,
op. cit., p. 92. See also Harmon Hartzell Bro,
A Seer Out Of Season,
op. cit., p. 133.

[149]
Edgar Evans Cayce, etc.,
Mysteries of Atlantis,
op. cit., p. 121.

[150]
Ibid, p. 131.

[151]
Confirmed by Douglas G. Richards, in a documented conversation by telephone in September 1995 (Richards is co-author with Edgar Evans Cayce and Gail Cayce Schwartzer of
Mysteries of Atlantis Revisited,
op. cit.). When we questioned Mark Lehner directly on this matter he replied in writing (pp. 1-2 of letter dated 15 October 1995): ‘I believe I probably am the “scholar” in question. It was never expected that the outcome of the ECF’s support of my Year Abroad at The American University in Cairo would be that I would become a “respected Egyptologist”. ARE-affiliated people supported my stint in Egypt because Hugh Lynn Cayce asked them to. Neither he nor I were sure where it would lead. I think Hugh Lynn helped me to go to Egypt because we both had some sense of destiny about it in line with the common New Age notion that it was “meant to be”.’

[152]
Edgar Evans Cayce, etc.,
Mysteries,
op. cit., p. 131. In his letter of 15 October 1995 Mark Lehner commented on our draft text, which was supplied to him without footnotes: ‘I do not know the reference for your note [20] but I suspect that rather than a prospectus written before I went to Egypt as a student at AUC, this summary was written in hindsight several years later than 1973.’

[153]
Edgar Evans Cayce, etc.,
Mysteries,
op. cit., p. 132.

[154]
Mark Lehner,
The Egyptian Heritage,
op. cit., back cover text.

[155]
Ibid., p. v.

[156]
In his letter to us of 15 October 1995 Mark Lehner commented as follows: ‘Neither I nor the Edgar Cayce Foundation had anything to do with the first two seasons of the SRI programme at the pyramids and elsewhere in Egypt. This is not clear in your text. The SRI “Science and Archaeology” Project picked up the work of Alvarez who used cosmic rays (before I arrived in Egypt) to analyze the Second Pyramid for undiscovered chambers. I met the SRI team in 1977 about the time they did preliminary resistivity measurements on the Sphinx. SRI was in the business of looking for hidden chambers at Giza well before I or the Edgar Cayce Foundation met up with them.’

[157]
L. T. Dolphin, E. Moussa et. al., ‘Applications of Modern Sensing Techniques to Egyptology’, Menlo Park, Calif, SRI International, September 1977.

[158]
Ibid. See also Zahi Hawass ‘Update’ to Sir W. M. Flinders Petrie’s
The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh,
Histories and Mysteries of Man Ltd., London 1990, p. 102.

[159]
Edgar Evans Cayce, etc.,
Mysteries,
op. cit., p. 132.

[160]
Mark Lehner’s letter to us of 15 October 1995, p. 3.

[161]
Cited in Jochmans,
The Hall of Records,
op. cit., p. 22ia. Confirmed in documented telephone conversation with project financier, 16 February 1995. Confirmed also by Mark Lehner in his letter to us dated 15 October 1995, p. 3.

[162]
Mark Lehner’s letter to us, 15 October 1995, p. 3.

[163]
Ibid.

[164]
Ibid.

[165]
Ibid.

[166]
See also Part I of the present work for further details of Mark Lehner’s ARCE project on the Sphinx.

[167]
Edgar Evans Cayce, etc.,
Mysteries,
op. cit., pp. 142-3. The discovery of the granite was also confirmed to us by Mark Lehner in his letter, op. cit., p. 4.

[168]
Venture Inward,
May-June 1986, p. 57.

[169]
Ibid.

[170]
See American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE) Newsletter No. 112, Fall 1980, p. 20 (‘The American Research Center Gratefully acknowledges the support of the Edgar Cayce Foundation for the work of the Sphinx Project’). See also ARCE Newsletter No. 131, 1985, p. 44 (Mark Lehner of the ARCE wrote: ‘We would like to acknowledge the financial sponsorship of ... Bruce Ludwig of TRW Realty in Los Angeles ... the Edgar Cayce Foundation ... Joseph and Ursula Jahoda of Astron Corporation in Falls Church, Va., ... Matthew McCauley of McCauley Music in Los Angeles ...’). Mr. Zahi Hawass, University of Pennsylvania, is specifically acknowledged as advisor and assistant to the project ‘and we look forward to continued collaboration’. The Edgar Cayce Foundation also funded (with US$17,000) a project at Giza in 1983-4, which involved an attempt to apply Carbon-14 dating to the mortar (which contains certain organic compounds) used in the Great Pyramid. This project was arranged by Mark Lehner through the ARCE’s director, Dr. Robert J. Wenke. We have met Joseph Jahoda several times at the Edgar Cayce Foundation in Virginia Beach in 1994-5 (see below), and also Matthew McCauley once at the Movenpick Hotel in Giza, Cairo, with Dr. Mark Lehner in March 1995 while researching this book.

[171]
Edgar Evans Cayce, etc.,
Mysteries,
op. cit., p. 138.

[172]
Smithsonian,
vol. XVII, No. I, April 1986. In his letter to us, op. cit., pp. 4-5, Mark Lehner commented: ‘By the time I started the Mapping Project, Cayce support of my work was phasing out. I stopped accepting their support after the Pyramids Radiocarbon Project [see footnote 38 above and 44 below for fuller details] because my interests and theirs were becoming too divergent. I would have to check the date of their last contribution, but if they did contribute to the mapping project it was a very minimal percentage of total financial support. The primary financial sponsors have been the Yale Endowment for Egyptology, Bruce Ludwig and David Koch. Koch and Ludwig have supported the excavations that we started in 1988.’

[173]
Archaeology,
op. cit., Sept-Oct 1994, p. 41.

[174]
The ARE Magazine,
Venture Inward,
‘The Search for Ra-Ta’, by A. Robert Smith, January-February 1985, p. 7.

[175]
Ibid., p. 6.

[176]
The Edgar Cayce Foundation had commissioned and funded a Carbon-14 dating project of the Giza monuments directed by Mark Lehner in 1983-4. Apparently small charcoal samples were extracted from the ancient mortar in the core’s joints. The results gave a wide range of dates for the Great Pyramid—between 3809 BC to 2853 BC—which is a few centuries earlier than the
c
. 2600 BC date assigned by Egyptologists, but very far from the 10,500 BC date given in the Cayce Readings. Although many doubts have been raised concerning the validity of the results (see
Venture Inward
issues May-June 1986 and November-December 1986), this, and other archaeological evidence Mark Lehner came across at Giza, appears to have undermined his beliefs in Cayce’s readings. For further details of the carbon-dating see Appendix 5.

[177]
Venture Inward,
May-June 1986, p. 56.

[178]
Ibid., p. 57.

[179]
Ibid.

[180]
KMT Magazine,
Spring issue 1995, p. 4.

[181]
Ibid. In his letter to us, op. cit., p. 5, Lehner elaborated: ‘I am happy that my professional work developed out of a more personal quest—call it what you will, philosophical, spiritual, ethical. Rather than look only for agreement with notions I had already conceived before coming to Giza—that is, what I wanted to be true—I looked for ways to test these and, later, other ideas about ancient Egyptian cultural development. I found few resemblances between the physical evidence and Cayce-derived ideas of an earlier civilization at Giza. But I did find the pyramids to be very human monuments. Because there is such an abundance of evidence of real people and an Egyptian society building the Sphinx and the Pyramids, it seems culturally chauvinistic to ascribe these monuments to a different, conveniently lost, civilization on the basis of “revealed” information and ambiguous patterns. My work is still part of a lifelong quest for meaning. I would not change the path that led me to Giza even if I could.’

[182]
Charles Piazzi Smyth,
Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid,
W. Isbister, London 1880 edition (reprinted recently by Bell Publishing Co., New York 1990 under the title
The Great Pyramid).
For the connection of the Petries with Piazzi Smyth, see H. A. Bruck and Mary Bruck,
The Peripatetic Astronomer: The Life of Charles Piazzi Smyth,
Adam Hilger, Bristol 1988, pp. 28, 123-6, 133-6. It seems William Matthew Flinders Petrie’s father, William, almost married the daughter of Piazzi Smyth, Henrietta. She was to marry eventually, however, Professor Baden-Powell (the father of the founder of the Boy Scouts). William Petrie was later introduced by Mrs. Piazzi Smyth to Anne Flinders, whom he married—hence the name Flinders Petrie. ‘So Mrs. (Piazzi) Smyth,’ wrote Flinders Petrie, ‘was the agent by whom scouting and Egyptian archaeology took their present form’ (see
Seventy Years in Archaeology,
Sampson Low, Marston & Co. Ltd., London, 1931, p. 4).

[183]
Al Akhbar Al Yom
weekly of 8 January 1994, front page article entitled ‘Stealing of Egypt’s Civilization’. Translation by Fouad Nemah of the official Egyptian Translation Bureau.

[184]
Mystery of the Sphinx
was a Magic Eye North Towers Production (Executive Producer: Boris Said; Producer: Robert Watts; Directed by Bill Cote of BC Video NY).

[185]
Ibid.

[186]
Mark Lehner’s letter, op. cit., p. 5: ‘Yes, this sounds like the fine people of the Cayce community, some of the nicest and most positive individuals I have known.’

[187]
As a result of receiving this letter, which clarified many points, we were pleased to revise the present chapter extensively into the form that appears herewith.

[188]
Mark Lehner’s letter, op. cit., p. 1.

[189]
CNN News reports October 1995; Middle East News Agency (MENA) 25 October 1995. At time of writing (November 1995) Zahi Hawass is the Director of the Giza necropolis for Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities and thus has overall responsibility for all excavations taking place on the site.

[190]
Robert Bauval and Adrian Gilbert,
The Orion Mystery,
op. cit., Mandarin paperback edition, 1995, epilogue pp. 237-50. Also discussed recently in
Amateur Astronomy and Earth Sciences,
‘Operation Dixon’ issue 1, November 1995 (Chief Editor: Dave Goode).