That phrase, “actual gateways, or doorways, to the otherworld,” is William Romain’s, cited at the end of the previous chapter with reference to the Hopewell earthworks. I quote it again here to emphasize the peculiar interchangeability of spiritual beliefs in the Nile Valley and the Mississippi Valley. Although widely separated in time and space, the ancient inhabitants of these two regions seem to have shared a core set of ideas about the afterlife destiny of the soul and seem, moreover, to have been largely in agreement not only that those ideas should be manifested in architecture, but also on many of the specific characteristics of that architecture, and on the purpose that the architecture was intended to serve.
Thus, while one reproduced Orion’s belt and the constellation of Leo and the other orchestrated complex architectural dances aligned to lunar and solar standstills, the fundamental objective of both was to open portals between sky and ground through which the souls of the dead could pass.
I’m not ruling out the possibility that some of the monuments of the Mississippi Valley are “constellation diagrams”—or constituent parts of “constellation diagrams”—much like the Giza monuments. Indeed Ross Hamilton, as we saw in part 1, has long been of the opinion that Serpent Mound is a terrestrial figure of the constellation Draco. George Lankford, on the other hand, makes a strong case that it represents the constellation Scorpius.47 The point is not whether one is right or wrong, but that both see the possibility that the mounds and earthworks could have been used to represent constellations.
Perhaps we’ll never know for sure, since so much of North America’s pre-Columbian heritage has been destroyed. Nevertheless, efforts are already being made.
Stepping back in time from the Mississippian civilization, for example, William Romain’s detailed studies of the Hopewell lead him to conclude that, in the minds of those who made them:
the Newark Earthworks were a portal to the Otherworld that allowed for interdimensional movement of the soul during certain solar, lunar and stellar configurations.48
He also argues that the “Great Hopewell Road,” an ancient causeway that once ran straight for more than 60 miles between Newark and High Bank (see chapter 20), “was the terrestrial equivalent of, or metaphor for the Milky Way Path of Souls providing a directional component for soul travel to the Realm of the Dead.”49
Further, Romain joins George Lankford in linking Serpent Mound to Scorpius and in concluding that “Serpent Mound was a cognate for the Great Lowerworld Serpent which guarded the Realm of the Dead.”50
What confronts us with the Hopewell, then, as with ancient Egypt and as with the Mississippian civilization, is a Realm of the Dead in the sky and its representation by architectural structures on the ground. It is part of the brilliance of such structures that they can play multiple roles in the cosmic drama. Thus, while the Great Sphinx may be the terrestrial counterpart of the constellation Leo, its gaze also sacralizes the union of heaven and earth at sunrise on the equinoxes. And while Serpent Mound may indeed be the earthly twin of the constellation Scorpius, its open jaws and the oval earthwork between them also serve to unite ground and sky at sunset on the summer solstice.
In this connection, let’s reconsider the reference cited earlier from the Book of the Dead concerning a great serpent on the brow of a mountain that brings the boat of the Sun God Ra to a halt, plunging that deity into a “mighty sleep” with nothing more than a glance.51 It may, of course, be a coincidence, but this description resonates curiously with the situation of Serpent Mound. For what do we encounter there on the bluff above Brush Creek if not a massive serpent effigy with its gaze targeted on the sun at its midsummer standstill? That’s indeed a time, as we’ve seen, when the setting point of the solar disk appears to remain fixed at the same place on the horizon for 3 days, an event that might appropriately be expressed, in mythical language, as a “mighty sleep” brought on by the precisely aimed gaze of the Serpent.
Then, too, the great serpent in the Book of the Dead is described as having “the first 8 cubits of its length”—its head and neck, in other words—“covered with flints and with shining metal plates.”52 The resonance here is with George Lankford’s study of Native American traditions of the Great Horned Water Serpent (see chapter 23), sometimes described as the “Master of the Beneath World” and sometimes as “the Great Serpent with the Red Jewel in its Forehead”—a notion not so very far away from the ancient Egyptian representation in which the creature’s head and neck glitter “with flints and with shining metal.” It is this Great Jeweled Serpent, Lankford concludes, represented as an adversary on the Path of Souls, that is depicted very frequently in Moundville designs where it is directly linked to other imagery associated with the afterlife journey. He also makes a strong case that Serpent Mound is a three-dimensional representation of the same supernatural entity53 and draws an interesting comparison with myths of the Cherokees describing the Uktena, “a great snake, as large around as a tree-trunk,” with:
a bright blazing crest like a diamond on its forehead, and scales glittering like sparks of fire.54
The same myths also tell us that the gaze of this serpent had the power to “daze” people so that they were stopped in their tracks and could not escape from it,55 and again there is a notable parallel here with the great serpent of the Book of the Dead whose gaze plunges even the Sun into a “mighty sleep.”56
Kheti, a serpent of the Duat.
RENEWAL AND REBIRTH
SCHOLARS ARE IN NO DOUBT that the ideas about the afterlife journey of the soul expressed in the ancient Egyptian funerary texts are much older than the surviving inscriptions and extend far back into the oral traditions of the pre-dynastic, pre-literate period before 5,500 years ago.57
Likewise, although we have no hieroglyphs or inscriptions from North America, it’s noteworthy that the same geometrical concerns and the very same alignment to the summer solstice sunset that we see at Serpent Mound, supposedly from the “Adena” period around 2,300 years ago, are also present at Watson Brake 5,500 years ago. And indeed we may say that the sudden burst of mound-building and earthwork construction across the Lower Mississippi Valley between 6,000 and 5,000 years ago is mysterious and unexplained. Like the sudden and fully formed appearance of the high civilization of Egypt, it seems just to have come out of nowhere, with no apparent antecedents, yet already in possession of advanced knowledge.
The earliest mound sites we know of in North America may possibly date back as far as 8,000 years.58 After that the trail goes cold.
But then why should we be surprised? The trail goes cold for a full 1,000 years between the end of the Watson Brake epoch and the beginning of Poverty Point, and it goes cold again several times thereafter, only to reappear reborn and renewed on the far side of each lacuna. The same stop-start process, however, also means that we can’t date the inception of the tradition to its oldest manifestations so far found.
First, the archaeology is very far from complete, and given the destruction of so much of the evidence from prehistory, will never be complete—so our ability to figure out what really happened in the North American past is deeply compromised. It may be that there was no mound-building at all before 8,000 years ago, but it could equally well be that the evidence of an earlier mound-building episode has simply been lost.
Second, because we are dealing with a system of ideas that has a proven ability to appear and disappear and reappear again fully formed, we must consider the possibility that it is such a “reappearance” that the archaeological record has identified at the supposed “earliest” mound sites—in other words, that the skills manifest in those already very ancient sites were, as my friend the late John Anthony West used to put it about the civilization of ancient Egypt, “a legacy not a development.”
But a legacy of what? And when? And how is it that it keeps on turning up all around the world, in different places at different times, but always expressing and manifesting the same core ideas?
Once again,
the ancient Egyptian texts offer some suggestive answers.
REBIRTH OF A LOST WORLD
THIS TIME IT’S NOT THE funerary texts I’m referring to, but the Edfu Building Texts, so called because they are inscribed on the walls of the Temple of Horus at Edfu in Upper Egypt.
These texts take us back to a very remote period called the “Early Primeval Age of the Gods”59—and these gods, it transpires, were not originally Egyptian,60 but lived on a sacred island, the “Homeland of the Primeval Ones,” in the midst of a great ocean.61 Then, at some unspecified time in the past, an immense cataclysm shook the earth and a flood poured over this island, where “the earliest mansions of the gods” had been founded,62 destroying it utterly, submerging all its holy places, and killing most of its divine inhabitants.63 Some survived, however, and we are told that this remnant set sail in their ships (for the texts leave us in no doubt that these “gods” of the early primeval age were navigators64) to “wander” the world.65 Their purpose in doing so was nothing less than to re-create and revive the essence of their lost homeland,66 to bring about, in short:
The resurrection of the former world of the gods …67
The re-creation of a destroyed world.68
For those readers not already familiar with the enigma of the Edfu Building Texts, and who would like to know more, I give a detailed analysis in my book Magicians of the Gods. I won’t repeat here the case I made there, nor support it with the evidence presented there. The takeaway is that the texts invite us to consider the possibility that the survivors of a lost civilization, thought of as “gods” but manifestly human, set about “wandering” the world in the aftermath of an extinction-level global cataclysm. By happenstance it was primarily hunter-gatherer populations, the peoples of the mountains, jungles, and deserts—“the unlettered and the uncultured,” as Plato so eloquently put it in his account of the end of Atlantis—who had been “spared the scourge of the deluge.”69 Settling among them, the wanderers entertained the desperate hope that their high civilization could be restarted, or that at least something of its knowledge, wisdom, and spiritual ideas could be passed on so that mankind in the post-cataclysmic world would not be compelled to “begin again like children, in complete ignorance of what happened in early times.”70
In this Edfu account of the wandering civilizers am I wrong to be very strongly reminded of the Tukano origin myth, given in chapter 18? It tells of how “Helmsman” and “Daughter of the Sun” brought the gifts of fire, horticulture, pottery-making, and other skills to the first humans to enter the Amazon while other “supernaturals” traveled over all the rivers, explored the remote hill ranges, identified the best places for settlement, and “prepared the land so that mortal human creatures might live on it.”
Before returning whence they had come these so-called supernaturals:
Left their lasting imprint on many spots so that future generations would have ineffaceable proof of their earthly days and would forever remember them and their teachings.71
These same spots, very frequently marked with petroglyphs, are still held sacred by the Tukano today, anthropologist Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff confirms, as “proof of the divine origin of the cultural heritage, the foundations of which had been laid down by the spirit beings who, at that time, still dwelled upon earth.”72
Returning to ancient Egypt and to the Edfu texts, we’re told that the survivors of the Island of the Primeval Ones:
journeyed through the … lands of the primeval age. …73 In any place in which they settled they founded new sacred domains.74
We may deduce, therefore, that part of their mission was to repromulgate the lost religion of the days before the flood.
Next we learn that architecture, initially in the form of earthen mounds, was also central to their mission. Indeed it was so central that they carried with them a book, The Specifications of the Mounds of the Early Primeval Age, that literally “specified” the locations in the Nile Valley upon which every mound was to be situated, the character and appearance of each mound, and the understanding that those first, foundational mounds were to serve as the sites for all the temples and pyramids that would be built in Egypt in the future.75
Little wonder then that included among the company of the “gods” of Edfu were the Shebtiw, a group of deities charged with a specific responsibility for “creation,”76 the “Builder Gods” who accomplished “the actual work of building,”77 and the “Seven Sages” who, in addition to dispensing wisdom, as their name suggests, were much involved in the setting out of structures and in laying foundations.78
My argument has long been that the Edfu Building Texts reflect real events surrounding a real cataclysm that unfolded between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago, a period known to paleoclimatologists as the Younger Dryas and that the Texts call the “Early Primeval Age.” I have proposed that the seeds of what was eventually to become dynastic Egypt were planted in the Nile Valley in that remote epoch more than 12,000 years ago by the survivors of a lost civilization and that it was at this time that structures such as the Great Sphinx and its associated megalithic temples and the subterranean chamber beneath the Great Pyramid were created. I have further proposed that something resembling a religious cult or monastery, recruiting new initiates down the generations, deploying the memes of geometry and astronomy, disseminating an “as-above-so-below” system of thought, and teaching that eternal annihilation awaited those who did not serve and honor the system, would have been the most likely vehicle to carry the ideas of the original founders across the millennia until they could be brought to full flower in the Pyramid Age.
TURTLE ISLAND
IF WE TAKE THE EDFU Building Texts seriously, with their depiction of seafaring missions sent all around the world to attempt to restart a civilization after a global cataclysm, and if ancient Egypt is the distant descendant of one of those missions, then we would expect to find other distant descendants elsewhere in the world.
It is my case in this book that we do indeed find such a descendant civilization in the Mississippi Valley and that, like ancient Egypt, it carries the DNA of a “ghost” civilization of remote prehistory. At sites such as Cahokia and Moundville, and 1,000 years earlier at Newark and High Bank, and 1,000 years before that at Poverty Point, and again 2,000 years before that at Watson Brake, we see the same sky-ground geometrical and astronomical system at work, with origins that keep on receding deeper and deeper into the past until the trail fades from view around 8,000 years ago. In the case of the older sites in this continuum—despite early evidence of a special place granted to the constellation Orion across North America79—there is insufficient information for us to be sure of the afterlife beliefs of the people who made them and whether they were linked to the “Path of Souls” complex that we find so amply demonstrated in the later sites. But the fact that such beliefs are confirmed at Cahokia and Moundville, and other relatively recent Mississippian sites where the archaeological evidence can be enriched with ethnographic data, and the fact that they are also strongly implicated in Hopewell and Adena sites such as Newark, High Bank, and Serpent Mound, suggest strongly that the same “cultural package” of sky-ground geometry and astronomy, linked to the same set of beliefs about the afterlife journey of the soul, is likely to have been at work from the beginning to the end of the mound-building enterprise in North America.
Then there’s the matter of the Amazon, where earthworks incorporating geometrical and astronomical memes identical to those manifested in the ancient Nile and Mississippi River Valleys are now emerging from the jungle hand in hand with traditions of “geometrical gods” and evidence of an ancient quest using vision-inducing plants to gain knowledge of the realm of the dead.
At the same time, the whole story of the peopling of the Americas is up for grabs. We know that the New World has been separated from the Old—a gigantic island—since the epoch of sea-level rise at the end of the Ice Age between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago. We know that there were subseque
ntly no significant transfers of culture or genes between the two regions until about 500 years ago, when the European conquest of the Americas began. We may safely conclude, therefore, that anything held in common culturally or genetically between the Old World and the New that is not the result of mixing in the past 500 years is either a coincidence or has to date back at least 11,600 years—and could, of course, be far older than that.
The extraordinary similarities we’ve considered between ancient Egypt and ancient North America are far beyond the power of coincidence to explain and yet the differences, and the physical and temporal separation of the Nile and Mississippi Valley civilizations, mean direct influence also must be ruled out.
What’s left is a remote third party—a lost civilization, perhaps even the “island” that the Edfu texts call the Homeland of the Primeval Ones destroyed in the global cataclysm of 12,800 years ago.
North America—“Turtle Island” in Native American tradition—is always, almost automatically, assumed to be a place to which culture was brought from elsewhere, but let’s shift the reference frame. What if North America itself was the Homeland of the Primeval Ones? What if the distinctive system of ideas involving the afterlife journey of the soul and the building of very specific types of structures thought to facilitate that journey weren’t brought to North America but originated there?
Now that the “Clovis First” nonsense has finally been laid to rest we know for sure that humans have been in the Americas for at least 25,000 years, with compelling evidence for an even earlier presence 50,000 years ago or more. Indeed if, Tom Deméré and his team have correctly read the clues at the Cerutti Mastodon Site, the real First Americans may have inhabited the New World—as far south as San Diego—as much as 130,000 years ago.
America Before Page 36
