Secrets of Ancient America: Archaeoastronomy and the Legacy of the Phoenicians, Celts, and Other Forgotten Explorers

by Carl Lehrburger

  So what did this evidence from Crack Cave suggest? McGlone speculated that a group of Celtic travelers, originating in Iberia or from somewhere around the Mediterranean region, traveled across the Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico, where they headed up the Mississippi River to the Arkansas River and into the Western regions by way of the Cimarron and Purgatoire tributaries.

  “But what were they doing in southeastern Colorado?” Barker mused.

  Perhaps they were exploring and mapping North America or perhaps they were seeking a travel route to the Rocky Mountains, seeking mineral wealth and an easier way to the Rocky Mountains. On the way, the natural springs and protection of Picture Canyon would have offered a relatively safe settlement site to stay through the winter. And they wouldn’t have been the only ones to use it. Based on the abundance of different styles of rock inscriptions, the site was occupied at least seasonally for thousands of years. A party of Old World travelers would have found their way to it by following well-worn trails and/or through communications with the natives.

  Fig. 7.8. Close-up of the Crack Cave gate. Thanks to the preservation efforts of public agencies and private citizens, a metal gate was installed to protect the Crack Cave entrance.

  Most of the old-time ranchers and farmers and their next generation have loved and respected the land, and their willingness to protect and share the history is part of America’s dwindling heritage. Future generations will owe a debt to ranchers and farmers like Ted Barker, who passed in 2012, for his work identifying, preserving, and recording ancient American rock art.

  Today, the preservation efforts at Crack Cave have been a successful collaboration to protect the unique history left on the rocks by ancient travelers. Unfortunately McGlone’s education efforts have been less successful. During my last equinox visit several years after his death, the Comanche National Grassland ranger who opened the Crack Cave gate told the crowd of onlookers entering the cave that the marks were made by Native Americans with only a passing reference to “other theories.”

  Fig. 7.9. Well-formed Ogham inscriptions west of Denver, on a natural rock shelter, before and after the cover-up.

  Compounding the problem, sometimes the evidences of Old World journeys to the New World disappear almost as rapidly as they are discovered. For example, from McGlone I learned that west of Denver on the Colorado Front Range was a series of Ogham markings on an exposed rock outcropping known as the Central Colorado Inscription. McGlone, Leonard, and Fell worked on the translation, which they established as, “ROUTE GUIDE; TO THE WEST IS THE FRONTIER TOWN WITH STANDING STONES AS BOUNDARY MARKERS.” In other words, based on the location and the Celtic interpretation, the inscription was created to direct ancient travelers to a nearby shelter.

  I visited the site on occasion to study and document it, but sadly I have to use the past tense to describe this site. To keep the public away, all of the inscriptions have since been buried under more than four feet of dirt by the owners.

  The inscriptions near Denver, based on the location and the Celtic interpretation, were created to direct ancient travelers to a nearby shelter. Little has been written about these Ogham inscriptions beyond the brief mentions in McGlone and colleagues’ books and in several ESOP journal articles. I recall this here less for what was inscribed and more as a reminder of how quickly the New History can disappear from view without conscientious perseveration and public education efforts.13

  8

  Old World Cosmologies at the Anubis Caves

  On days of the equinoxes, a group of petroglyphs in a small cave are lighted successively by the sun, much as actors on a stage are spotlighted in an opera. Finally, just at sunset, after the other figures have been eclipsed by the shadow, only what we interpret as Anubis, the Egyptian jackal god, is left in sunshine on the cave wall. Some inscriptions at the site describe the opera. Others identify the site as equinoctial, and still others tell of additional interactions with the sun at that time of year. It is at once the most complex and epigraphically interesting petroglyph site the authors have yet seen. And it is located in the western United States—in the Panhandle of Oklahoma.

  PHILLIP M. LEONARD, A NEW WORLD MONUMENT TO MITHRAS

  CELTIC RELIGION IN OKLAHOMA

  I was fortunate over the years of exploring rock art to become acquainted with Phillip M. Leonard. He had a military career and was a medical researcher with a background in languages, having studied Arabic, Hebrew, and Semitic alphabets. During the 1970s Leonard had read Fell’s America B.C., and although fascinated, he thought it lacked convincing proof that Ogham had been used in the Americas.

  Nevertheless, Leonard began to study Ogham writing and the Celtic language and became convinced that there were Ogham inscriptions at the central Colorado site outside of Denver, as described at the end of the previous chapter. As a blind test, he sent sketches to Fell of the writing he had found and requested a translation. Fell responded with essentially the same translation that Leonard had made, and this confirmed to him that “something was really going on.”

  Then, in the early 1980s, Leonard was introduced to Bill McGlone. They quickly became friends and colleagues, and the two visited and researched many sites in Colorado and New Mexico, while eventually founding the Western Epigraphic Society. He also coauthored four books with McGlone and authored or coauthored numerous journal articles.1 The culmination of his research into the Anubis Caves and their connection with Old World cosmologies was a monograph he called A New World Monument to Mithras.2

  On several occasions after I had been led to Crack Cave, I mentioned to McGlone my interest in visiting the oft-discussed Anubis Caves site, but he wouldn’t give up the guarded secret location.3 “We don’t just take anybody there,” he said gruffly on one occasion to remind me of my newcomer status. However, my perseverance paid off, and I was invited to accompany him and Leonard on a research expedition into the rugged terrain of crisscrossed canyons, arroyos, and washouts that occur periodically from torrential flash floods in the Oklahoma Panhandle.

  While Crack Cave demonstrated equinox morning alignments, the alignments at the Anubis Caves were almost exclusively at equinox sunsets, the one exception being a summer solstice alignment. Elsewhere in the region there have been a number of Old World discoveries. One was the so-called Pontotoc County Stele, which was apparently uncovered in the 1930s while the Works Progress Administration was quarrying stone. Barry Fell had determined it was carved by an early Celtic colonist writing in Portuguese Punic, which was associated with the Cachao-da-Rapa region in northern Portugal.4 There have also been numerous appearances of rune stones. One called the Heavener Runestone was cited by diffusionist researcher and Fell colleague Gloria Farley,5 who then became a driving force in the formation of Runestone Park close to the Arkansas border, where the inscription can be viewed.

  Gloria Farley is perhaps best known for her research into the Anubis Caves. She presented articles in ESOP6 and published In Plain Sight: Old World Records in Ancient America, her seminal work recounting ancient travelers in America.7 She was among only a few researchers publicly supporting the diffusionist hypothesis in the Barry Fell era.

  Fig. 8.1. Drawing of the Heavener Runestone characters. (Based on a drawing by Gloria Farley, from In Plain Sight)

  Also several Old World coins have been found in the Oklahoma region, including one found in the town of Heavener by Wilbert Stewart in 1976. This coin shows the profile of Nero, and the Greek inscription on the obverse says “Nero Caesar Augustus.”8 It was later identified to have come from Antioch, Syria, and was made in A.D. 63. But these and the many other artifacts relating to Old World travelers in the region pale in comparison to the Anubis Caves.

  I arrived at Ted and Alma Barker’s ranch north of Springfield, Colorado, the day before the equinox. Phillip Leonard was already there and was catching up with the couple in their ranch kitchen. He, Ted, and Alma Barker were old friends, and Leonard had made the journey many times to their ranch from his home in Uta
h. As Alma Barker readied dinner, the three of us reviewed a video of the Anubis Cave light animation we would be seeing the next evening with Bill.

  I would come to discover that Anubis Caves is one of the most significant examples of Old World contact in America before Columbus, and I was fortunate indeed to have McGlone and Leonard as mentors and guides. The two were the world’s experts on this remote and little-known, much less understood, archaeological treasure that is on private property and off-limits to the public. Each had thoroughly researched and documented the major calendrical alignments and their relationship to Old World cultures. Through their research and firsthand teachings and observations, I was able to begin to grasp in a few short years what it had taken McGlone and Leonard decades to unravel.

  Fig. 8.2. Phillip M. Leonard of Utah, a retired military professional, cancer researcher, and author, has spent more than twenty-five years investigating the Anubis Caves.

  We met up with Bill along the way at a designated meeting place in the late afternoon. Our small group then arrived at the series of sandstone caves after a brief walk from our parked cars in a nearby field of corn. As I neared and began to make out markings on the wall, I was struck by how quiet it was at this remote location, which contributed to a sense of awe and reverence. After years of persistence, I had finally been invited to accompany McGlone and Leonard to see one of the most significant pieces of evidence for Old World travel in the Americas.

  There are five main caves clustered together and a sixth farther north containing Plains Indian animal petroglyphs. Eroded windows between them connect Caves 1, 2, and 3. In each of the five main caves are found different markings, including petroglyphs and inscriptions that share commonality and cohesion. According to McGlone and Leonard the extensive engravings and archaeoastronomy make it one of the best surviving records of the cult of Mithras, an Old World religion that spanned the Persian and Roman empires.

  Fig. 8.3. A gathering at Anubis Caves 2 and 3, facing west. The Anubis Caves are a series of six eroded caves in a low sandstone bluff.

  Fig. 8.4. Anubis Caves engravings from Cave 2.

  MITRA, MITHRA, OR MITHRAS

  After decades of study, McGlone and Leonard determined that the Anubis Caves complex was dedicated to Mithra, one of many Old World sun deities. But unlike the images of the Mithraeums (temples) found in Old Europe, they concluded that the imagery of the Anubis Caves is a blend of Mithraism and Celtic religion that incorporates Celtic inscriptions invoking Bel and Grian along with other Old World images adorning Cave 2.

  The ancients had many different names for the sun god that were sometimes interchangeable and sometimes even represented its different aspects. Between 2000 B.C. and 1500 B.C. Aryan tribes including the Mitanni peoples from the Russian steppes swept south into India and Iran. Thus the names Mitra, Mithra, and Mithras were all derived from the Indo-European root mihr, which translates both as “friend” and as “contact.” The two major branches who came from India in the East and the Iran region in the West worshipped and sacrificed cattle to Mitra, a god associated with fire. Afterward the Romans adopted him as the god Mithras. Following this, he underwent more changes when his religion spread to the Celtic peoples in Britain and Iberia, and back in India and Iran, the religion remains alive as the Parsees and Zarathustrians.9

  Fig. 8.5. A Persian high-relief sculpture of Mithra (or Mitra) from Taq-e Bostan (western Iran), from a sculpture of Ardeshir II, king of Persia, A.D. 379–383 (not shown). (Photo by Philippe Chavin)

  Fig. 8.6. Roman image of Mithras slaying the bull. (From Leonard, A New World Monument to Mithras)

  It was during later Roman times that a great emphasis was placed on a ritual of Mithras slaying a sacrificial bull that symbolized the creation of the cosmos. This was known as the tauroctony (the bull-slaying scene), which, in earlier Iranian and Indian observances had been much less prevalent. However, an explanation of why the tauroctony scene does not appear at the Anubis Caves is that the inscriptions were made before the cult in Europe had adopted this ritual.

  Fig. 8.7. Detail of petroglyph identified by McGlone as Mithra from Anubis Cave 2. The weathered open-mouthed sun god image appears to be chanting.

  McGlone pointed out that the anthropomorphic figure in Anubis Cave 2 represented Mithras. Its head was about the size of a small coin and not easy to see among many different and somewhat confusing images on the cave wall. Like many other depictions of Mithra in the Old World, he has a cape and the rays of the sun create a halo or crown. Also, what appears to be an erect phallus is positioned near his left hand.

  The neo-Platonic philosopher Porphyry of Tyre (A.D. 234–305) reported that Mithras was “seated on the line of the equinox with North on his right, South on his left. That is, Mithras is placed on the celestial equator facing west.”10 Correlating with Porphyry’s description, the image identified as Mithras in Anubis Cave 2 also faces west. In addition, Porphyry also suggested that the Milky Way was related to the afterlife world. In this context, as will be seen, the Milky Way was very important to Mithraic symbolism.

  Mithras is often shown wearing a cape covered with stars. At the Anubis Caves he wears a capelike adornment and is positioned between rising and set-ting suns. Seven rays emanate from his head. The seven rays may also relate to the seven grades of Mithraic initiation. Each grade had its own set of teachings, represented by a celestial body and a symbol, and these are found on the Anubis Panel in Cave 2.11

  The cult of Mithraism had both exoteric and esoteric aspects. Exoteric manifestations included calendar keeping, retelling of ancient mythology and the observation and performance of rituals, all of which are identifiable in Anubis Cave 2. But less apparent are the hidden esoteric aspects of the religion. This “coding” of esoteric information is demonstrated in a collage of figures embedded in the main panel in Cave 2. Leonard interprets the “complex glyph,” a combination of seven symbols, as the symbols for the seven grades of Mithraism. His research indicates that each stage of advancement represented a level of understanding embodied by a planet, a day of the week, and its own metaphoric image. In the Mithraic mystery rites, these symbols were used to instruct initiates in proper attitudes and conduct. The seven symbols were: (1) Corax (raven), (2) Nymphus (bride), (3) Miles (soldier), (4) Leo (lion), (5) Perses (the moon, son of Perseus), (6) Heliodromus (one who proceeds like the sun, Lugh), and (7) Pater (Mithras).12

  There is also a direct connection between Mithras, Christ, and the religions that bore their names. For example, both are solar deities (sun/son), and both are said to be born of a virgin in the town of Bethlehem on the winter solstice. Jesus had twelve human disciples, while Mithra had twelve heavenly constellations. In other words, Mithraism was reinvented as Christianity. The archetypal symbol of the sun god, who evolved from Mitra to Mithra to Mithras, was overlaid onto the life of Christ, the son of God.13

  Fig. 8.8. Drawing of details of the Cave 2 “complex glyph,” showing an exploded view of a compact cluster of some of the Mithraic grade symbols. From top to bottom on the left side are Leo, Nymphus, and Corax. Miles can be seen on the extreme right. (From Leonard, A New World Monument to Mithras)

  It is worth mentioning a few other connections between the two religions. Catholics engage in a ritual Eucharist, as do the Mithraists. Purification through a ritualistic baptism was required of the faithful in both religions. The resurrection of Jesus is celebrated every year on Easter, which is recognized as the time he was resurrected. Mithra’s resurrection was also celebrated every year during his principal festival—a date that later became Easter. Some of the major traditions of the original Christian Church of Rome—including miters, wafers, water baptisms, altars, and doxology—were all adopted from the earlier traditions of Mithraism dating back to ancient pre-Christian Persia and India.

  ANUBIS CAVES INSCRIPTIONS

  The name of the site itself came from Gloria Farley, who was shown the caves by a local rancher in 1978.14 She then identified the doglike figure
in Cave 2 as the Egyptian jackal god Anubis, hence named the location the Anubis Caves.15 What clearly associates the canine at the Anubis Caves and the Egyptian Anubis god is a flail, a staff used for beating wheat, which rests on the back of the Oklahoma petroglyph figure. Also, the “white crown” of Egypt, a distinctive headdress common to Egyptian images, adorns the Anubis at Anubis Caves.

  There are also Ogham and Ogham-like inscriptions in five of the six Anubis Caves. (“Ogham-like” refers to untranslated inscriptions that have the appearance of Ogham.) These engravings were notably different from the pecked abstract or pecked representational-style petroglyphs more common to indigenous dwellers of the region. At the Anubis Caves, as had been the case at Crack Cave, the Old World god Bel is identified, as is Grian, the Old Irish name for Apollo and another word for the sun. Other names for the sun god include Lug (Lugh), Apollo, Bel (Belus, Baal), and Perseus.

  Judged by their appearance compared with nineteenth- and twentieth-century graffiti on the panel, the Anubis Caves inscriptions are quite old. McGlone had sought the assistance of an expert in the cation ratio dating, an experimental technique that involves chemical analyses of the rock varnish and patina that remained in the pecked areas, which indicated the inscriptions are two thousand years old, plus or minus three hundred years.16

  Fig. 8.9. and 8.10. Two examples of the Egyptian Anubis figure. Known as the jackal god, Anubis ruled over the night in Egyptian mythology. (The drawing on the right is from Leonard, A New World Monument to Mithras and McGlone et al., Ancient American Inscriptions)