The Stargate Conspiracy

by Lynn Picknett

  So, although it is impossible to say categorically that Sirius C does not exist, neither is it true to claim emphatically that ‘the existence of Sirius C has now been confirmed’, as Robert Temple does.19 And even if its existence is eventually proven, its characteristics could not be remotely similar to those ascribed to Dogon belief by Temple.

  Undeniably, Sirius was deemed to be a very important star by the ancient Egyptians, for reasons that are not entirely clear, despite the confident assertions of Egyptologists. The usual explanation is that, because the heliacal (dawn) rising of the star occurred just before the annual, life-giving inundation of the Nile, the Egyptians made a simplistic connection between the two events, and believed that Sirius somehow caused the flood. This explanation is easily revealed to be nonsense. While it is true that the heliacal rising of Sirius marked the beginning of the ancient Egyptian year, the onset of the flood was not a regular event, and it could happen at any time within a period of over two months.20 In some years the flood would have started before Sirius’s heliacal rising. As the yearly rising and setting of the stars fell out of step with the seasons, the two events ceased to have any correlation early in Egypt’s recorded history. It is assumed by Egyptologists that the calendar was fixed at a period when Sirius’s dawn rising coincided with the inundation, but there is no proof of this. There is no way of knowing for sure why Sirius was so important to the ancient Egyptians but there could be a very mundane explanation: it is, after all, the brightest star in the sky.

  Temple may claim that the ancient Egyptians hailed Sirius as important because beings from that solar system bestowed the art of civilisation upon them, but his theory depends entirely on establishing that the Egyptians, like the Dogon, knew of the existence of Sirius B. In our view, the case he presents is by no means conclusive.

  Much of Temple’s case for the ancient Egyptians knowing the ‘Sirius secret’ is based on the alleged relationships between words in various languages and the interpretation of myths, but these often prove to be unsatisfactory. His information about ancient Egyptian myths relies too heavily on classical writers, rather than the ancient Egyptian sources themselves, which leads to several errors. Perhaps his greatest mistake is in making too much of the fact that Sirius was known to the Greeks as the ‘Dog Star’. This name arose because it was found in the constellation of Canis Major (the Great Dog), which follows behind Orion as the constellations rise each night. To the Greeks, Orion was the hunter, so the small constellation at its heels was taken to represent his hunting dog, hence the name given to the main star of the constellation. 21 This is entirely a classical Greek concept, and emphatically not one that was shared by the ancient Egyptians, for whom Sirius/Sothis was firmly the star of the goddess Isis, as well as sometimes also being associated with Horus, her son.22 However, the Dog Star epithet leads Temple to link this with Anubis, the dog- or jackal-headed god of the underworld, and to draw conclusions concerning Sirius based on the myths connected with him, as well as with dogs in Greek and other mythologies. Here we have a whole series of connections made by Temple to support his hypothesis, but they are, in fact, based on a faulty premise.

  Such is the influence of Robert Temple that his ideas, even if they are, as we have shown above, sometimes based on flawed reasoning, often surface in the work of others. For example, Robert Bauval and Adrian Gilbert, in their The Orion Mystery (1994), also state that Anubis was connected with Sirius, giving as their source Robert Temple’s The Sirius Mystery!23 No other source makes this claim for the simple reason that the ancient Egyptians themselves never made any such connection.

  Temple’s desire to incorporate all things doggy into his argument extends to his claim that the Great Sphinx of Giza was not intended to represent a lion, but a recumbent dog - Anubis once more.24 That indisputably canine god is indeed frequently depicted lying down, but the ancient Egyptians were very specific and conservative about their iconography, and took pains always to represent them in a strictly standard way. One of the main features of representations of Anubis was his long, bushy tail, resembling a fox’s brush. Try as we might, we cannot distinguish the Sphinx’s tail as anything other than that of a lion.

  Temple makes one particular assertion that we are surprised has gone unchallenged for many years. He brings into his argument certain connections with the Greek god Hermes and sections of the Hermetic literature, the highly prized books of arcane wisdom that emerged from Greek-dominated Egypt in the late centuries BCE or the first centuries CE. Temple’s justification for making connections with the Hermetica is the supposed ‘fact’ — repeated several times in his book — that Hermes was the Greek equivalent of Anubis.25 This is completely wrong. Hermes was unequivocally identified with Thoth, the ibis-headed ancient Egyptian god of wisdom and learning.26 And to make a connection with Sumerian mythology, Temple states that ‘Anubis was not entirely a jackal or dog, he was merely jackal or dog-headed’27 (having apparently forgotten the connection he had made between Anubis and the Sphinx!). Again, this is simply inaccurate. Anubis was often depicted as a complete dog, lying down with a watchful expression, most famously as found in Tutankhamun’s tomb.

  Such mistakes and flawed logic, of which there are many examples in The Sirius Mystery, seriously weaken Temple’s overall thesis that the true nature of the Sirius system was known to the ancient Egyptians and somehow transmitted to the ancestors of the Dogon. Temple argues that the ‘secret knowledge’ of Sirius B and of contact with its inhabitants reached the Dogon through the Garamantes, a North African people who were in contact with the Greek-speaking world and passed on the Sirius secret, having themselves learned it from the Egyptians, when they migrated through the area that is now occupied by the Dogon in the 11th century CE.28 However, anthropologists consider it likely that the Dogon did not arrive in their new homeland until the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries CE, coming from further to the south-west, across the Niger.29

  Temple makes another error, which in itself may appear to be minor and excusable, but which is of major importance to this investigation. He analyses the origins of the word ‘ark’, which he connects with the Egyptian arq, meaning ‘end’ or ‘ completion’, and states that arq ur was the ancient Egyptian name for the Sphinx,30 a meaning that has been taken up by many of those with another agenda. But arq ur does not mean ‘Sphinx’. The idea that it does is a mistake, which originally came from Temple’s misreading of Sir E.A. Wallis Budge’s An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary. It is true that, against the entry for arq ur,31 it says ‘Sphinx, 2, 8’, but this is not the definition of the word, but a reference to Budge’s own source — a French Egyptological journal called Sphinx: Revue critique embrassant le domaine entier de l’Egyptologie. So ‘Sphinx, 2, 8’ really refers to page 8 of volume 2 of this publication. Arq ur actually means ‘silver’, and in any case, as Budge’s source shows, the word entered into the Egyptian language very late, being borrowed from the Greek argyros (and not, as Temple claims, the other way round).32 This slip, which seems so trivial, has serious repercussions for the beliefs of many thousands of people today.

  One very curious aspect of Temple’s The Sirius Mystery is that it attracted the attention of not only both the American and British security services, but also the Freemasons. In the 1998 edition, Temple describes how the Dogon mystery was first brought to his attention by his tutor and friend, the American philosopher Arthur M. Young, in 1965.33 In 1968, when Temple decided that he wanted to study the mystery further, Young provided him with a privately made translation of Griaule and Dieterlen’s Le renard pâle, their main work on the Dogon. Temple tells how this copy was stolen from him in London by someone whom he later learned worked for the CIA, presumably in an attempt to interfere with his research.34 (Temple is an American, but he has lived in Britain since the late 1960s.)

  This is puzzling. Why should the CIA have wanted to stop Temple researching the Dogon enigma? Or did they simply want to acquire a rare English translation of the French work
because they somehow perceived the Sirius mystery to be a matter of national security? Surely the CIA are not short of reliable translators.

  Even more baffling is the fact that Temple found himself the victim of a campaign of harassment by the CIA when The Sirius Mystery was published in 1976.35 For example, they put pressure on a business associate of his to make him break up their partnership. Temple claims that this harassment continued for fifteen years. Why? If, like the theft of his copy of Le renard pâle, it was intended to prevent his researches, it was remarkably inept and unsuccessful; after all, it was far too late to harass him when the book was already being sold. Neither did the input of the CIA prevent him from reissuing the book - so what was the point? (This CIA harassment is all the more baffling because, as we will see in Chapter 5, Temple himself is a staunch defender of that organisation.) The plot thickens when it is realised that not only American intelligence agencies were taking an interest in the book. Temple discovered that one of the British security services had actually commissioned a report on it - and that MI5 had carried out security checks on him.36

  Temple also relates how he was approached by a prominent American Freemason, Charles E. Webber - an old friend of his family (who have been high-ranking Freemasons for generations) — who asked him to become a Mason. According to Temple, Webber was not just any rank-and-file Freemason, however, but a 33rd degree Mason, the highest rank in the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, the dominant form in the United States. And he wanted Temple to join specifically so that they could discuss his book as equals and without the risk of his revealing Masonic secrets to an outsider. Webber told him:

  We are very interested in your book The Sirius Mystery. We realise you have written this without any knowledge of the traditions of Masonry, and you may not be aware of this, but you have made some discoveries which relate to the most central traditions at a high level, including some things that none of us ever knew.37

  Why were the CIA, MI5 and the Freemasons so interested in Temple’s The Sirius Mystery? Indeed, their interest by no means stopped there: these shadowy agencies lurked behind every corner as our investigation proceeded, and their role in an insidious but very powerful conspiracy was to become disturbingly clear.

  The New Egyptology

  Central to the New Orthodoxy of Egyptology is its redating of the Sphinx of Giza, that enigmatic stone hybrid that lies downhill from the three pyramids, in its own hollowed-out enclosure. It was originally carved out of an outcrop that protruded above the limestone bedrock, after which the builders dug out the enclosure to fashion the body.

  Its ancient name was Sheshep-ankh Atum — ‘Living Image of Atum’, the creator god — it is thought that ‘Sphinx’ is a corruption of Sheshep-ankh.38 Among its other names were Ra-Horakhti, from Horakhti meaning ‘Horus of the Horizon’ (Horus the hawk-headed god in his guise as the sun god Ra) and Hor-em-Akhet, ‘Horus in the Horizon’, rendered in Greek as Harmarchis.39 There are many similar combinations of the god names of Horus and Atum, representing the ancient Egyptian concept of their gods as fluid, and dynamic, principles.

  The standard theory about the Sphinx is that it was built by Khafra, who also constructed the Second Pyramid, and carved in his likeness. This is based on the supposed resemblance between the Sphinx’s mutilated face and a statue of Khafra in the Cairo Museum. However, analysis by forensic experts has confirmed what is obvious to anyone with eyes - namely that the two look nothing like each other.40 In fact, the only evidence linking it to Khafra is the Sphinx Stela, an inscribed stone plaque set up between its paws. This describes how Thutmoses III (1479-1425 BCE), while sleeping beside the Sphinx when out on a hunting trip, had a dream that instructed him to clear the sand away from it. At the bottom of the stela, in hieroglyphs that have since flaked off completely, were the words: ‘Khaf ... the statue made for Atum-Harmakhis’. Egyptologists have read ‘Khaf’ as ‘Khafra’, and extrapolated that the sentence originally told how Khafra made the Sphinx. This is certainly wrong. From copies made of the stela it is known that the word was not enclosed in a cartouche,41 the standard oval-shape that - as any student of hieroglyphs learns in their first lesson — always indicates the name of a king.

  It has been suggested that the head of the Sphinx was originally that of a lion - which makes perfect sense - but was later recarved in the likeness of a reigning king or pharaoh. This theory is based on the fact that the present head is too small for the body, though it is worth noting that, for much of its history, the Sphinx was buried up to its neck in sand, so later Egyptians could have recarved the head without necessarily knowing that the likeness of a lion’s body lay beneath. Significantly, the head and face of the Sphinx are noticeably less eroded than the body, even though it has been standing up to its neck in sand for a substantial number of years, suggesting that the head has been recarved in more recent times.

  The erosion of the Sphinx triggered off a major controversy in recent years, leading to a number of new books that reached a massive international audience. Study of the erosion on the Sphinx’s body and the sides of the Sphinx enclosure was initiated by maverick American researcher John Anthony West, based on observations originally made by R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz in the mid 20th century.

  Usually described as a ‘philosopher’, Schwaller de Lubicz (1887-1961) was in fact an occult scholar who lived in Egypt between 1938 and 1952, studying the symbolism of the temples, particularly at Luxor. As a practising alchemist he was already steeped in Hermeticism and other esoteric lore and saw the same principles embodied in the temples of pharaonic Egypt. He was particularly interested in the numerology, mathematics and geometry of the temples, which he believed conformed to certain principles he already understood from his occult studies. He wrote a number of books about his interpretation of the Egyptian culture, the most comprehensive being his three-volume Le temple de l‘homme (The Temple of Man), published in 1957. In particular he espoused a Pythagorean system in which the number nine was the most important, and this led to his fascination with the Great Ennead of the Heliopolitan religion. He believed that the Heliopolitan system was an expression in mythological terms of certain fundamental principles, and translated the Egyptian neter, meaning ‘god’, as ‘principle’.42 Schwaller de Lubicz often spoke of the ‘Nine Principles’, which develops greater significance as our investigation proceeds.

  John Anthony West first discovered the works of Schwaller de Lubicz while working on his book The Case for Astrology (1970). After studying the works at length, West decided to write a more easily accessible account of Schwaller de Lubicz’s theories, previously only available in rare, weighty French tomes. West’s version was entitled Serpent in the Sky (1979).

  West had noticed in Schwaller de Lubicz’s book an observation that the heavy erosion on the body of the Sphinx was not caused by wind-blown sand, but by water. As he comments in Serpent in the Sky:

  In principle, there can be no objection to the water erosion of the Sphinx, since it is agreed that in the past, Egypt suffered radical climatic changes and periodic inundations - by the sea and (in the not so remote past) by tremendous Nile floods. The latter are thought to correspond to the melting of the ice from the last ice age. Current thinking puts this date around 15,000 BC, but periodic great Nile floods are believed to have taken place subsequent to this date. The last of these floods is dated to around 10,000 BC.43

  West realised that not only could this be tested, but also that it may have other, more momentous, implications. He wrote in 1979: ‘In other words, it is now possible to prove “Atlantis”, and simultaneously, the historical reality of the Biblical Flood.’44 (Note that both Schwaller de Lubicz and West believed that a flood — or series of floods — had been responsible for the Sphinx’s erosion.)

  After trying for some time to find a geologist to analyse the erosion, West eventually attracted the interest of Dr Robert Schoch of Boston University. After analysing the pattern of erosion, Schoch concluded that it had indeed been crea
ted by water — rain water.45 His work has since been confirmed by other geologists. When the BBC made a Timewatch television programme about the Sphinx in 1994, for example, they commissioned their own independent geologist to check Schoch’s results, and he arrived at the same conclusion. In fact geologists generally have been happy to agree with Schoch. Egyptologists, on the other hand, refuse to be convinced, whatever the quality of the evidence. For example, Dr Zahi Hawass, then Director-General of the Giza Plateau, said: ‘If geologists prove what Schoch is saying, still in my opinion, as an Egyptologist, the date of the Sphinx is still clear to us.’46

  As climatologists can pinpoint fairly accurately periods of rainfall in the past, this would help to date - even to redate — the Sphinx. Schoch concluded, working back from the level of erosion, that the rock forming the body of the Sphinx and the enclosure wall had been exposed to the elements between 7000 and 5000 BCE. This, of course, makes the Sphinx considerably older than mainstream Egyptologists claim.

  Schoch’s work was taken by Graham Hancock and John Anthony West to support an even earlier date for the Sphinx. They say that Schoch, as an academic with a reputation to lose, was simply being conservative by assigning the Sphinx’s erosion to the most recent wet period before the accepted dating of the Sphinx.47 In fact, Schoch had concluded that the erosion was perfectly consistent with the rainfall in that period, writing in 1995 that his analysis led him to the conclusion that ‘the earliest portions of the statue date back to between 7,000 and 5,000 BC’.48

  West believed that a flood had been responsible for the erosion of the Sphinx. Schoch had, in fact, proved him just as wrong as he had the orthodox Egyptologists. This did nothing to prevent Schoch’s findings being transmuted into ‘evidence’ for the Sphinx’s far greater antiquity. As West says: ‘You really have to go back before 10,000 BC to find a wet enough climate in Egypt to account for the weathering on this type and scale. It therefore follows that the Sphinx must have been built before 10,000 BC.’49