The Sign and the Seal

by Graham Hancock

  It seemed to me, as I researched Newton further, that pursuit of this method perhaps explained why he had involved himself in an exacting study of some twenty different versions of the book of Revelation. He had learned Hebrew in order to do the job properly81 and had then carried out a similarly meticulous exercise on the book of Ezekiel.82 I was also able to establish that he had drawn on the information contained in this latter work to produce a painstaking reconstruction of the floorplan of the Temple of Solomon. Why? Because he had been convinced that the great edifice built to house the Ark of the Covenant had been a kind of cryptogram of the universe; if he could decipher this cryptogram, he had believed, then he would know the mind of God.83

  Newton’s Temple floorplan had been preserved in the Babson College Library.84 Meanwhile the seventeenth-century scientist had expressed his other ‘theological’ findings and observations in private writings that had totalled well over a million words.85 In the mid-twentieth century these rather surprising manuscripts came to light and were purchased at auction by John Maynard Keynes. ‘Newton was not the first of the age of reason,’ the obviously shaken economist later told the Royal Society, ‘he was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than ten thousand years ago.’ Keynes made an extremely careful study of the manuscripts and concluded – significantly in my view – that Newton saw

  the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence, certain mystic clues which God had hid about the world to allow a sort of philosopher’s treasure hunt to the esoteric brotherhood. He believed that these clues were to be found partly in the evidence of the heavens and in the constitution of elements, but also partly in certain papers and traditions handed down by the brethren in an unbroken chain back to the original cryptic revelation.86

  Indeed so! And although I knew that I might never be able to prove that the ‘brethren’ in question had been directly linked to the occult traditions of the moon-god Thoth – and to those scientists and civilizers who had been ‘saved from water’ – I felt that there was at least sufficient evidence to confirm one intriguing fact. In making his greatest discoveries, Newton had indicated several times that he had drawn not only upon his own genius but also upon some very old and secret repository of wisdom. He had once stated quite explicitly, for instance, that the law of gravitation expounded in his Principia was not new but rather had been known and fully understood in ancient times; he had arrived at it by decoding the sacred literature of past ages.87 On another occasion he had described Thoth as a believer in the Copernican system.88 Before that he had aligned himself with the German physician and alchemist Michael Maier (1568–1622) who had argued that, throughout history, all the true adepts of science had derived their knowledge from the Egyptian moon-god.89

  Amongst many other curiosities, I discovered that Newton had been struck by the fact that ‘there was a general tradition of deluge amongst ancient peoples’90 and had shown considerable interest in the biblical view that Noah was the common ancestor of all humanity.91 Moreover, despite his own devoutly held religious convictions, he seemed at times to have seen Christ as an especially gifted man and as an interpreter of God’s masterplan, rather than as the Son of God.92 What I found most fascinating of all, however, was that the really pivotal figure in Newton’s theology, and in his conception of early science, had been none other than the prophet Moses, whom he had regarded as an adept in the mysteries of the universe, a master of alchemy, and a witness to the double revelation of God (as expressed in His word and in His works).93

  Long centuries before our own enlightened era, Newton had believed, Moses understood that matter consisted of atoms, and that these atoms were hard, solid and immutable: ‘gravity accrued to both atoms and to the bodies they composed; gravity was proportional to the quantity of matter in every body.’94 Newton had also regarded the account of creation presented in Genesis – and attributed to Moses – as an allegorical description of an alchemical process:

  Moses, that ancient Theologue, describing and expressing ye most wonderful Architecture of this great world, tells us that ye spirit of God moved upon ye waters which was an indigested chaos, or mass created before by God.

  Later, referring to the efforts of the alchemists, the great English scientist had added:

  Just as the world was created from dark chaos through the bringing forth of the light and through the separation of the aery firmament and of the waters from the earth, so our work brings forth the beginning out of black chaos and its first matter through the separation of the elements and the illumination of matter.95

  Last but not least, I thought it was not accidental that Newton’s favourite biblical passage96 had been one that had hinted at the existence of some form of covert knowledge available only to initiates:

  And I will give thee the treasures of darkness, and hidden riches of secret places, that thou mayest know that I, the Lord, which call thee by thy name, am the God of Israel.97

  I reasoned that if Newton had indeed had access to the same ‘treasures of darkness’ and to the same ‘hidden riches’ as Moses, then this would imply – at the very least – the continuous existence over a period of millennia of a clandestine sect or cult structured to pass on an exclusive and privileged wisdom. This sounded far-fetched; it was, however, by no means impossible. On the contrary, knowledge and skills had frequently and successfully been transferred down the generations – and from one region of the world to another – without any concrete evidence being available to document the process. For example, Rhabdas, a mathematician who had lived in the city of Constantinople in the twelfth century AD, was known to have used a method for deriving square roots that had existed only in ancient Egypt more than two thousand years previously and that had not, otherwise, been employed elsewhere.98 How, and from where, he had acquired this technique was not easy to explain. Similarly, I was very much aware that the transmission of esoteric information, coupled with the teaching and sharing of arcane rituals and ceremonies, had occurred for centuries within the various Masonic orders without any public record ever being available.

  Charting the contours of a genuinely reticent sect was, therefore, a daunting undertaking. But what I found more daunting by far was the task of guessing the real nature of the science and technology that such a long-lived and secretive institution as the cult of Thoth might have protected and preserved – particularly if, as I suspected, that science and technology had originated in a historically remote and now utterly obliterated culture. As I wrote in my notebook:

  It would be a mistake to assume that our own twentieth-century machinery and inventions are any guideline; on the contrary, if an advanced society did exist at some archaic period, then its wisdom is likely to have been quite different from anything with which we are familiar, and its machines could reasonably be expected to have operated according to principles unknown to us.

  A monstrous instrument

  It was with such thoughts, as my research moved on, that I found myself drawn to the strange passages in the Old Testament books of Exodus and Deuteronomy which described the encounters between God and Moses on Mount Sinai. Amidst thunder and fire, electrical storms and clouds of smoke, Yahweh supposedly disclosed the blueprint of the Ark of the Covenant to the Hebrew magus and presented him with the stone Tablets of the Law inscribed with the Ten Commandments. Then the Ark itself was built by the artificer Bezaleel who slavishly followed the ‘divine’ plan, almost as though he knew that he was forging some monstrous instrument.

  And this, I suspect, is what the Ark really was: a monstrous instrument capable of releasing fearful energies in an uncontrolled and catastrophic manner if it was mishandled or misused in any way – an instrument that was not conceived in the mind of God, as the Bible teaches, but rather in the mind of Moses.


  A master sorcerer in an era when sorcery and science were indistinguishable from one another, it is after all possible (and perhaps more than possible) that Moses could have had the technical knowledge – and therefore the ability – to design a device of this sort. There is absolutely no proof of this, of course. Nevertheless I think that only those with a pedantic and cavilling attitude to history would insist that the ancient wisdom traditions of Egypt could have contained no special skills or ideas of a technical nature on which the prophet might have drawn in order to imbue the Ark with the awesome powers attributed to it in the Old Testament.

  Speculation on such matters is surely healthy and – for those readers who are interested in penetrating more deeply into the mystery – I offer the following hypotheses and conjectures as food for thought.

  Motive and opportunity

  Assume for a moment that Moses did indeed have the technical knowledge to create ‘a monstrous instrument’ capable of destroying city walls (as in the case of Jericho99), striking people dead (as in the case of Uzzah and the ‘men of Bethshemesh’100), inflicting cancerous tumours on those who approached it without proper protection (as in the case of the Philistines after the battle of Ebenezer101), and counteracting gravity (as in the case of the bearers whom, on one occasion, it ‘tossed into the air and flung to the ground again and again’102).

  If Moses could have made such a machine then it only remains to ask whether he had a motive to do so, and whether he had the opportunity.

  I would like to suggest that he had ample motive. One in a long line of civilizing heroes who had been ‘saved from water’, there is evidence to suggest that his prime objective in life might not have been to establish the Jewish faith (although he certainly did that) but rather to civilize the Israelites – who, prior to the Exodus, were little more than an anarchic tribe of migrant labourers marooned in Egypt.

  Suppose that the prophet decided to inspire (and thus mobilize) this primitive and almost ungovernable group of nomads by convincing them that he was going to lead them to the ‘Promised Land’ – Canaan – which he had enticingly depicted as ‘a good land and a large … a land flowing with milk and honey’.103 If so then he was far too wily a leader, and far too astute a judge of human frailty, to take what was basically a disorganized rabble straight there. He knew that they would face formidable foes when they eventually arrived; if they were to overcome these foes, therefore, he would first need to mould and shape them, bend them to his will, and impose some discipline upon them.

  This reasoning appeals to me because it seems to offer a logical explanation for something that otherwise makes very little sense – namely the fact that the Israelites supposedly spent forty years wandering in the inhospitable wildernesses of the Sinai peninsula.104 There were, at the time, at least two well known and much-frequented trade routes which normally enabled travellers to cross the deserts between Egypt and Canaan in just a few days.105 It seems to me, therefore, that Moses’s decision not to use these highways (and instead to inflict a lengthy period of hardship on his people) could only have been a deliberate and calculated strategy: he must have seen this as the best way to get the Israelites into shape for the conquest of the Promised Land.106

  Such a strategy, however, would also have had its drawbacks – notably the problem of persuading the tribesmen to stick together in the desert and to put up with all the difficulties and austerities of nomadic life. This problem was truly a knotty one: the biblical account of the wanderings in the wilderness makes it painfully clear that Moses had a hard time trying to keep his people’s confidence and to force them to obey him. It was true that they fell briefly into line whenever he worked some new miracle (and he was obliged to work many); on other occasions, however – and particularly when they faced adversity – they seethed with discontent, criticized him bitterly and sometimes rebelled openly against him.107

  In such circumstances, is it not reasonable to suppose that the prophet might have seen the need to equip himself with some sort of portable ‘miracle machine’ to enthral and impress the Israelites whenever and wherever a bit of ‘magic’ was required? And wasn’t that exactly what the Ark was – a portable miracle machine which Moses used to ensure that the people would obey him no matter how difficult the circumstances?

  Examples of the sacred object being used in precisely this manner are not hard to find in the Bible. Indeed a dramatic change appears to have taken place in Moses’s behaviour after the building of the Ark. Previously he had responded to the incessant demands and complaints of the Israelites with relatively minor acts of wizardry – striking a desert rock with his wand in order to make fresh water gush forth from it,108 extracting potable water from a stagnant pool,109 delivering food in the form of manna and quails,110 and so on and so forth. Later, however, the prophet did not bother with conjuring tricks like these. Instead, whenever the people grumbled, rebelled against him, or dared to dispute his leadership in any way he simply turned the Ark on them – with predictably dreadful results.

  On one fairly typical occasion he used it to inflict a disfiguring skin condition on his sister Miriam because she had questioned his authority.111 The Bible calls this skin condition ‘leprosy’.112 When Miriam had been suitably chastened, however, her sores vanished. Since they had appeared in the first place immediately after she had been exposed to the mysterious cloud that sometimes issued forth from between the two cherubim mounted on the Ark’s lid, it is most unlikely that they were actually caused by leprosy.113 Might they not rather have been induced by some chemical or other contaminant released from the Ark itself?

  Miriam was not the only person to have been affected in this way after incurring Moses’s wrath. Moreover other dissidents not lucky enough to be members of the priestly family tended to be punished with even greater severity. A particularly interesting series of events occurred in response to a mutiny in which the ascendancy of Moses and Aaron was openly questioned:

  Two hundred and fifty of the sons of Israel joined forces against Moses and Aaron saying, You take too much on yourselves! The whole community and all its members are consecrated, and Yahweh lives among them, Why set yourselves higher than the community of Yahweh?114

  Moses was at first so shocked by this insubordination that he ‘fell upon his face’.115 He quickly recovered, however, and proposed the following ‘test’: to find out whether the two hundred and fifty rebels were really as ‘holy’ as he was, he suggested that they should each fill a bronze censer with incense and that they should then come in before the Ark to burn this incense.116 If this was done, he argued, it would allow Yahweh to ‘choose the one who is the consecrated man’.117

  The challenge was accepted: ‘And they took every man his censer, and put fire in them, and laid incense thereon, and stood at the door of the Tabernacle … with Moses and Aaron.’118 No sooner had this gathering taken place than ‘the glory of Yahweh appeared’.119 Then the deity supposedly gave his ‘favourites’ a three-second warning of what he was about to do: ‘Yahweh spoke to Moses and Aaron. He said, “Stand apart from this assembly, I am going to destroy them here and now.” ’120 At this, the prophet and the High Priest ‘threw themselves face downward on the ground … And there came out a fire [from the Ark] and consumed the two hundred and fifty men that offered incense.’121

  Afterwards,

  the children of Israel spake unto Moses, saying, Behold, we die, we perish, we all perish … Whosoever cometh anything near unto the tabernacle of the Lord shall die: shall we be consumed with dying?122

  They had, it seemed, learned a salutary lesson. Subdued by the powers of the Ark, they mounted no further rebellions of any significance. On the contrary, apart from a few low-key gripes and murmurs, they fell very much into line behind Moses and did exactly what he told them to do during the remainder of their sojourn in the wilderness.

  So much, then, for motive. Moses clearly had great need of a portable miracle machine exactly like the Ark. Moreover, on
ce he had equipped himself with that machine – if machine it indeed was – he showed no hesitation in using it.

  Motive and ability alone, however, do not add up to a coherent case. The next question, therefore, is this: did he have the opportunity to prepare a proper blueprint for the Ark and to fabricate some sort of ‘power-pack’ for it – some sort of energy source by means of which it might be activated?

  The answer is yes – ample opportunity. To understand why it is worth recalling the main events of Moses’s life, in the order that they occurred:

  1 He was born in Egypt.

  2 He was cast adrift on the Nile in a basket made of papyrus reeds coated with bitumen and pitch.

  3 He was ‘saved from water’ by the daughter of Pharaoh.

  4 He was reared in the royal household where he learned ‘all the wisdom of the Egyptians’ – and became an adept in sorcery, and almost certainly a High Priest.123

  5 At the age of forty,124 according to the Bible, he heard that his own native people – the Israelites – were being oppressed by the Egyptians. Accordingly he left the court and went to find out what was happening to them. He discovered that they were living a life of bondage, forced to do hard labour day and night. Incensed at this cruel treatment, and at the arrogance of the Egyptians, he lost his temper, killed an overseer and then fled into exile.125

  6 At the age of eighty126 – i.e. forty years later – he returned from exile to lead the Israelites out of their captivity.

  What happened during the missing forty years? The Bible is singularly unhelpful in answering this question, devoting just eleven verses to direct discussion of the entire period.127 It does, however, make one thing abundantly clear: in all this great expanse of time the key event was Moses’s encounter with Yahweh at the burning bush – an encounter that took place at the foot of Mount Sinai where, some time later, the Ark of the Covenant was to be built.