Seed of Knowledge, Stone of Plenty: Chapters 9 & 10 by John Burke & Kaj Halberg

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Many of us are familiar with the annual news clips, showing thousands of modern Druids, clad in white robes, communing at Stonehenge each summer solstice. They claim a common law right to celebrate here the rites that their priesthood practiced for many centuries.

This claim may well be true, but it is less well known that by the time the first Druids arrived in England, Stonehenge had been in use for thousands of years and then had already been abandoned for centuries. The Druids may have adopted it, but they had no more idea than we do today, who built it or why.

For us, like many others, a long-running topic of conversation has been how such a magnificent work could have sprung up, seemingly from nowhere. In fact, Stonehenge is the pinnacle of a type of structure that had been evolving for centuries in Europe, in particular above the underground chalk aquifers of southern England. Once again, geology lay behind the design and location of one of the most famous types of giant megalithic structures: the henge. A henge is simply a ring-shaped ditch.

Stonehenge really consists of two structures: a stone circle and a henge. And for a thousand years before the stones went up at Stonehenge, people all over Europe were digging systems of ditches, called causewayed enclosures. We discovered that these structures also showed links with agriculture and energy.

Their unfathomable effort of cutting down forests in order to scratch in the earth, and their refusal to spend the day hunting, must have looked like a sure recipe for suicide to the English natives. But, amazingly, they prospered. In fact, they were so successful that they created many problems for themselves.

By about 3800 BC, whole sections of southern England were treeless. Heavy rains washed away huge quantities of topsoil from the hillsides. Continued farming of the same spot yielded less and less, and in as little as two or three years the soil was drained of nutrients.

The earliest farmers would just move to new ground. But this strategy could not last. The population of a peasant farming community grows at the rate of 0.5 to 1% per year. This means that within one thousand years a hundred initial farmers might number 5 million.¹ Also, the removal of the forest caused the ground to be waterlogged in low-lying areas, and blanket peat would spread. Once peat took over an area, it could not be farmed again.

Most arable land had already been farmed to exhaustion by 3200 BC, and England – like the rest of Europe – experienced a fertility crisis.²On Dartmoor, early farmers built stone rows, borrowing a page from their brethren in Brittany. These stone alignments were just two parallel lines, made of much smaller stones than the multi-ton behemoths at Carnac. Some are only four inches high. But this was a region with little stone available. As at Carnac, the size of the stones grew steadily near one end of the alignment. Some of the stone rows ran for miles and are still visible, for instance at Shovel Down.³

In the Cornwall area, where stone was plentiful, dolmens were constructed – some strikingly similar to our New England rock chambers. Once again, a Neolithic population with exhausted soil turned to building megaliths.

On the Downs, where there are very few stones indeed, an entirely new model of Neolithic structure arose, named causewayed enclosures. They are areas, often with stone structures, surrounded by circular ditches hacked into the hard chalk, sometimes several in concentric circles. These henges were broken by one or several gaps, or causeways.

The largest of these early enclosures, on today’s Windmill Hill, consists of three concentric circles of shallow henges, measuring over one thousand feet across (Fig. 45). In the very center, atop the hill, the turf was removed to expose what geologists call ‘the living rock’ of chalk.⁶Since the enclosure was built, the entire hill has lost the top two feet of chalk, dissolved by rainwater. As we shall later see, this process is crucial to the function of causewayed enclosures.

It is estimated that over 100,000 man-hours were invested in construction of this enclosure, in an area with perhaps 4,000 people including children. Today, most archaeologists state that enclosures were constructed to create sacred places where the shamans and perhaps the people would come for rituals. Certainly, their theory may be correct, but on Windmill Hill, this space could have held 200,000 people – fifty times the estimated size of the local community.

And why did the builders almost always insist on hacking trenches into chalk rock, after dragging huge stones from afar? One academic theory is that these Herculean labors would foster a sense of community in the shared effort. However, hard, unproductive work during a period of starvation is hardly the recipe for ‘a sense of community’.

Indeed, Neolithic England was not a Garden of Eden. People here were subjected to famine and bad health, such as missing teeth or no teeth at all, spinal arthritis, and malformed hips, arms, wrists, hands, or feet.⁷These people were struggling to survive, yet they devoted staggering amounts of time and energy to erecting structures.

Some archaeologists simply admit that they have no idea of the use or purpose of causewayed enclosures. Some declare that they were designed to keep cattle and other livestock penned in. Yet there are so many breaks in the ditches at most enclosures, that this explanation is hardly plausible. Many authors claim that the ditches were made for defense. Aside from the fact that there is no record of warfare during this era of the Neolithic, the large number of gaps in the ditches belies a defensive intent. Moreover, the banks made from the excavated soil from the ditches are on the wrong side – the outside – for defense. The ditches are usually only two to three feet deep, hardly enough to repel any invader. No residential houses seem to have been erected inside or even nearby. They were not located near villages or even in convenient spots. Therefore, historians conclude, their purpose was ceremonial.⁸

Certainly, ceremonial rites did take place at the enclosures. At Hambledon Hill, more than one hundred skulls with long bones were buried in just one part of a ditch.⁹Try to picture the spectacle of one or two hundred supplicants in solemn procession – perhaps at night, illuminated by torches – each carrying a skull and placing it in the newly excavated ditch. As at Carnac, skeletons and skulls were associated with regeneration and rebirth. At Windmill Hill, goddess figurines were buried in the ditches, making yet another symbolic statement to affirm regeneration and fertility.¹⁰

One of the first features completed was a series of small open-air pits, lined with clay daub, along the innermost ditch. They look exactly like normal Neolithic grain storage pits, though shallower, ranging from 0.3 feet to a maximum of 1.4 feet deep.¹¹Any seed placed in these pits would have far more contact with the atmosphere than in the average storage pit. Was the seed placed here, so that it could be exposed to electromagnetic forces?

At Hambledon Hill enclosure, traces of grain have been recovered, but it seems that crops were not grown here, as “grain arrived at the site already threshed and cleaned”.¹²Pits of Windmill Hill enclosure contained pottery, so fresh when first used that it still carries imprints of the contents. The pots held emmer (a primitive type of wheat) and barley, the staples of that time.

However, there is something remarkable about the impressions. 61 of them show emmer only – no impressions of any seeds of weeds or wild plants. The emmer was grown and harvested elsewhere, cleaned thoroughly, then brought to the site.^13,14It had not been ground for flour or other food, but was brought in the form of seed. Some of the pottery was of a particular style, showing that it had been carried from a great distance.¹⁵

It looks as if people were not just bringing food as offerings, but rather that they were carrying their seed there from a great distance.

First, electrons are stripped off rain drops as they squeeze through the rock pores, in a physical process known as adsorption.¹⁶ This means that the water molecules now have a net positive charge and have left a negative charge behind in the chalk. This effect is doubly reinforced when the water actually dissolves the chalk. A calcium carbonate molecule will split, causing a calcium atom with a double positive charge (an ion) to be washed away in the water, leaving behind a double negative charge in the rock. The total effect is chalk with substantial negative charge, and water draining through it with substantial positive charge.^17,18,19

As we know, opposites are attracted, so this causes an electrical current in the ground. Just the movement of the electrically charged water will alone generate a magnetic field,²⁰ and we have measured both together at Silbury Hill (see below) after a night of heavy rain.

Combine all of the above with the fact that the seasonal vertical fluctuations of the water table in this chalk are some of the largest of any major aquifers in the world, up to a hundred feet.²¹ Furthermore, the magnitude of magnetic field change is proportional to the porosity of the rock,²² and chalk is extremely porous.

Because of all these factors, the southern England chalk lands are some of the best terrain in the world for geologically induced electromagnetic fluctuations. Not surprisingly, henges were overwhelmingly built on chalk, just above a waterway.

Now we understand why the megalith builders in the Downs would first scrape the soil away, until the ‘living rock’ of chalk was exposed directly to the air. The negatively charged rock would attract the positively charged atmospheric field lines, producing a scenario similar to what we found atop the Lost World Pyramid (Chapter 4).

A final ingredient is our old friend, the conductivity discontinuity. Aquifers are not homogeneous affairs. They are made up of layers, separated by bands of clay. And in many places, including the Downs, geological uplift has folded these layers upwards until they reach the ground surface. Where the borders of two aquifer layers reach the surface at the same spot, we have an interfluve. Since aquifers have different abilities to conduct electrical current, an interfluve constitutes a conductivity discontinuity.

The giant Neolithic structures at Windmill Hill (c. 3200 BC), Silbury Hill (c. 3000-2700 BC), Avebury Henge (c. 2600-2400 BC),²³ Stonehenge (c. 2200 BC), as well as at Overton Hill and numerous sites in Britain, were erected on knobs of Upper Chalk aquifers, intersecting with a layer of Lower Chalk aquifers, in other words on interfluves. In his classic Prehistoric Europe, famed archaeologist Timothy Champion describes how for 1,000 years causewayed enclosures all over Europe were dug at interfluves.⁴⁹

In 1993, we measured powerful pre-dawn bursts of telluric currents on the highest ridge in Wiltshire, next to the Vale of Pewsey, at the oldest Neolithic burial mound in the area, Adam’s Grave, using our magnetometer and ground electrodes. The view is glorious from this ridge, but it is also unusual electromagnetically. Just before summer solstice, we found the nighttime geomagnetic readings here weakened gradually by 400 gammas overnight – by far the largest nightly change we had ever measured. Then, within thirty minutes of sunrise, magnetometer readings came roaring back to normal. This activity is very unusual without a thunderstorm.

A few days later, we measured a corresponding huge dawn surge in electric ground current. In latitudes like southern England, fluctuations of this magnitude are simply not supposed to occur, according to standard theory.

On this ridge, we first experienced one electromagnetic phenomenon, for which we have no explanation. Occasionally, mid-to-late afternoon will show an enormous jump in airborne electrical charge. We still do not understand the physical process behind this, and, to our knowledge, no one does. But consider the following:

One June afternoon, atop the ridge that includes Milk Hill and rises right beside Adam’s Grave, our assistant was learning how to use the electrostatic voltmeter. Suddenly she cried out in some alarm, thinking she had done something wrong. She hadn’t. As we all watched, some invisible power circled us and sent the needle of the meter climbing. We switched to the high setting, staring open-mouthed, as it went right off scale at 10 kilovolts per inch and stayed there. It never came down again. Back in the U.S., the manufacturer informed us that the unit was beyond repair and would be replaced.

Experts in ball lightning have estimated that DC electric fields of only 5 kilovolts per inch (half of what we measured) can be enough to produce a glowing ball of ionized air.²⁴ We saw no lights during the afternoon hours when our meter fried. However, from Milk Hill and Golden Ball Hill, on the same ridge, numerous observations of glowing balls of light have been observed, many of which were videotaped. One shows the entire top of Milk Hill, seeming to glow with a giant orange hemisphere.²⁵ At the foot of the hill, tiny balls of white light have been taped, moving during daytime. Another video shows a glowing blob at an altitude of several hundred feet, seemingly changing shape like a loose water balloon.

Might similar lights have first drawn the early builders to these sites? Other magnetometer surveys, taken on different occasions on this hill, strongly suggest the presence of dynamic electromagnetic fields inside the ridge.

One day, circa 2660 BC, perhaps just after the harvest of emmer wheat, a group of these new settlers gathered on a low-lying spot at the foot of a small chalk escarpment, where the Middle Chalk aquifer protrudes into a region dominated by the Lower Chalk aquifer. This means that the ‘peninsula effect’ of heightened electromagnetic fluctuations should be present here, as well as the usual interfluve effect.

These farmers began removing the turf from the ground, cutting downwards until they had cleared a section of chalk bedrock, using a foundation of ‘living rock’.²⁷ As at Windmill Hill, it seemed important that they expose this electrically charged bedrock.

The workers staked out a circle, 120 feet wide, and covered it with a thick layer of gravel from the adjacent Kennet River. Next, they piled cut sod within the circle. Atop this came four consecutive layers of soil, clay, chalk, and gravel, each layer about two feet thick. The final mound must have looked like a drum, 15 feet high by 120 feet wide.

Around the mound, a 350 feet long circular ditch was dug. This pattern is familiar from the causewayed enclosures, but this time it was on a far more impressive scale. The ditch was 40 feet wide and 20 feet deep, part of it dug through the adjacent chalk hillside. However, two sections of the hill were left intact, forming bridges over the ditch from the hillside to the central mound. As the long ditch was being excavated, chalk blocks from there were piled into a stepped network of walls comprising a honeycomb of interlocking cells, into which loose chalk rubble was dumped. As time has shown, this structure was marvelously stable.²⁸

Year after year the farmers hacked, dug, shoveled, and carried. They used sharpened deer antlers as picks to hack at the solid chalk. Shoulder blades of oxen were then used as shovels to scoop up the rubble and pour it into baskets. As the ditch sunk ever lower, these baskets probably had to be carried up ladders to ground level and then up again to the top of the rising mound. This kind of activity is consistent with the large numbers of broken bones among male skeletons from this time.

The ditch, still being excavated, was filled in. In Stage 2, a new, bigger, circular ditch was marked out, encompassing the previous one. Investigations have shown that no grass ever grew on the outer layers of the first stage. This means that once construction on Silbury Hill, the mound’s current name, began, it would continue uninterrupted for an undetermined period. Some estimate a century, others twenty years. It would all depend on how many workers were present and how much of the year they labored. Importantly, they never paused for so much as a single growing season.

Let us look at the human side of this situation. First, a group of farmers move into this valley, seemingly so desperate that they settle in an area that was long since abandoned as infertile. For some reason, they dedicate probably 25% of their manpower to building this hill, investing a million man-hours of hard labor. Then someone tells them that it is not big enough, that they will have to redouble their efforts.

We propose that the people were willing to work on the mound because of some effect they wanted to achieve. So when, near the completion of the second stage, it became obvious that the desired effect still was absent, the people were willing to start all over again.

Stage 3 of Silbury Hill needed a completely new ditch. The old one was filled in (that must have hurt) and a newer one circumscribed it, marking the perimeter of the final version of the hill – 380 feet. This ditch was more than 20 feet deep and 70 feet wide at the top. The new hill was a complete layering over of the old one, but kept its slope of 30 degrees. The top was left flat. Eventually, the work was completed. (Fig. 46)

Silbury Hill stands undiminished today, almost 5,000 years later, attesting to the quality of the work. Holding a staggering 12.5 million cubic feet of chalk and soil, and covering 5.5 acres of ground, it rises sharply 130 feet above the low land. (Fig. 47)

On June 9, 1993 we planted geological electrodes at the top and bottom of the hill. Keeping the top electrode in place at the center of the flat top, we moved the bottom electrode to different positions around the base of the hill, recording substantial ground charge. Table 3 shows our measurements.

This is how we stumbled into the secret of henges and causewayed enclosures. As described in Chapter 2, telluric currents are concentrated in the top few feet of the ground and even a modest ditch will break their transmission, making them seek the path of least resistance. This is the importance of the causeway.

In this context, causeways are simply ground that the builders did not disturb. The original enclosures had many such gaps, but the ditch at Silbury Hill had but two. For telluric current, they were the paths of least resistance. And here before us, in the data from Table 3, was our proof: causeways were meant to conduct electricity. 240 degrees west from the peak is one of its causeways, and our electrodes showed that ground current was pouring through it, at more than double the rate of anywhere else.

Was this why emmer wheat was placed in clay-lined pits near the causeways of Windmill Hill? Was this why the Native American mound builders also dug trenches, enclosing many acres, and placed mounds just inside the causeway entrance? In this way, the current would first be concentrated in the causeway, then again in the mound.

The electrical effects of Silbury Hill appear to be seasonal, linked to the movement of water through the aquifer. When we returned two months later, the readings were down dramatically. Daily monitoring from July 31 to August 5, 1993 showed steady magnetometer readings and ground electrode readings from -72 mV/km to -110 mV/km, with one dramatic exception.

On August 2, it rained steadily all day, and water drained through the chalk surrounding the hill. The following day our ground electrode readings had gone from negative 105 mV/km to positive 70 mV/km. This is a change of 175 mV/km overnight – very dramatic for geological processes.

Even more exciting was the fact that these changes were accompanied by a corresponding alteration in the geomagnetic field. Magnetometer measurements atop the hill jumped first 150 gammas and then 300 gammas, over the next few days. This shift is proportional to the change in telluric current, following a ratio well known to science.²⁹

The most intriguing part about these measurements is not simply that they occurred in response to water draining through chalk, but that they were focused at the peak. Magnetometer readings at the base of the hill remained constant throughout this period. The top of this, the largest man-made mound in Europe, however, was turned into a concentrator of electromagnetic energy.

If achieving the effect that we measured was the reason for building Silbury Hill, it would explain why, in this period of agricultural crisis, they prospered. Within a century or two, they would start an even more ambitious project – erecting the giant henge at Avebury.

The greatest henge

Although Stonehenge gets all the publicity, Avebury is the largest and – many would say – the most impressive of all henges. As 18th Century antiquarian William Stukely stated, “Avebury so doth exceed Stonhenge, as a cathedral doth a parish church”.³⁰

Both sites, however, are masterful examples of the distinctive English contribution to megalithic architecture – the henge.

Avebury sits roughly between Windmill Hill and Silbury Hill, about a mile from either (Fig. 44). The design as well as its execution will awe any visitor. Inside the edge of a ditch, 1,000 feet across and circular to within a few inches, stands a ring of rough, unfinished, standing stones (Fig. 48).

Originally, 200 large stones were used for the circle but, unfortunately, most were destroyed in the 18th Century. Only smaller ones remain, weighing 7-8 tons apiece. Some of the original stones weighed 40 tons. Today, a small village sits inside the stone ring. In the ditch were four gaps or causeways, where the original bedrock was left intact.

No one knows how the builders surveyed the site to lay out the henge. The layout of Avebury is more perfectly circular than measuring with a rope would allow, because the stretching of the rope as it was pulled taut would create more error than is the case. Modern surveyors have difficulty being this precise. Without doubt, Avebury is one of the greatest engineering accomplishments of the ancient world.

The construction stretched over two or three centuries. It has been estimated that the work on the ditch and its bank alone required 1,560,000 man-hours, from a community of perhaps 4,000 people.³¹ The ditch was as deep as 33 feet in some places, less in others. To excavate it, four million cubic feet of chalk, about 200,000 tons, were cut and carried up ladders.

Clearly, there was something special about this place to the people who expended unimaginable efforts to create it. As with the causewayed enclosures, some historians maintain that Avebury was a defensive structure. If so, building the dirt wall outside the moat is poor planning – it gives your enemy the advantage of being able to shoot arrows down on you. Others theorize that the ditch was a cow pen.

The mound of material excavated from the chalk was simply dumped haphazardly in a hodgepodge of overlapping hills and ridges of various sizes, whereas the ring of stones was so precisely circular that it defies understanding. This contradiction vanishes if one assumes that the precision work was for a utilitarian purpose, and that the piles of excavated dirt were debris from the ditch.

We do not dispute that ceremonies took place here. Similar to what was found at the causewayed enclosures, an abundance of human skulls and long bones were buried at Avebury Henge. In addition, many human mandibles, or lower jaws, were found,³²just as at Carnac (Chapter 8).

These symbolic offerings have convinced many archaeologists that Avebury was a sacred ceremonial site. As we noted earlier, these offerings are typical fertility offerings, which would be in keeping with the henge as a generator of fertility.

From the central complex, two double rows of huge stones (today called avenues) were erected over two centuries, running out a mile or so. The West Kennet Avenue (Fig. 49), still fairly intact, connects with Overton Hill to the southeast – the site of a causewayed enclosure, stone circles, and a 150-gamma magnetic anomaly. The other avenue heads southwest to a spot near two huge, upright stones, called Adam and Eve. These stones are believed to be the only remaining ones from this avenue. The others were taken as building material over the centuries and can be spotted here and there in the walls of houses inside the stone circle.

Fig. 48. The south-western part of the enormous outer circle of standing stones at Avebury Henge. Before the building of Stonehenge, people would come in the thousands to this place, and the owners of the henge became wealthy. (Photo copyright © by Kaj Halberg)

The major part of those readings might easily have been lost. On a hot August day, while bending down to take a reading, I suddenly heard an unidentifiable noise right behind me. Turning around, I saw a sheep happily munching my notes. A good hundred visitors to the henge that day were treated to the spectacle of a seemingly deranged man, shouting and sprinting after a harmless sheep – all the way across the circle. Luckily the records, though crumbled and smeared in saliva, were still readable.

During daylight hours in August, near the stones of Adam and Eve, we measured a mysterious surge in geomagnetic readings. Instead of the usual surge of about 20-40 gammas during one hour at noon, we found a 250-gamma surge, 150 gammas of which lasted several hours. We have never encountered a similar midday surge anywhere else, nor can we find mention of any in the scientific literature. But it makes us wonder if this was a spot known to the builders to be so rich in electromagnetic energy that they wanted it to connect to the circle.

The daily magnetic readings all over Avebury die away overnight to a degree far greater than normal. Then, at sunrise, they suddenly come roaring back. Like Silbury Hill and Windmill Hill, Avebury was placed so as to fill a knob of Middle Chalk that extended into the Lower Chalk formation (Fig. 44). This placement will create the ‘peninsula’ effect, which heightens the fluctuations at this conductivity discontinuity.

At dawn, the ground current from the surrounding countryside is attracted by the henge, where the magnetic fluctuations are at maximum. It is well known that most of this current is transmitted near the ground surface. Digging even a shallow trench around the zone of magnetic changes creates an obstacle to the ground current. When electric ground current encounters the ditch, it will follow the path of least resistance, through the small opening of the causeway into the stone ring, now in a concentrated form.

Why did the builders of Avebury go to such trouble digging the henge up to 30 feet deep? Probably because underground electrical current travels best in wet layers of ground where the water in the aquifers of the chalk is stopped by a layer of clay. Throughout the 0.6-mile-long henge ring, the workers everywhere dug just deep enough to sever this electrically conductive layer and no deeper. This would force all ground current to concentrate at the causeways – where the stone avenues enter the central circle.

While the magnetism of the standing stones is not strong enough to noticeably deflect a compass needle, the more sensitive magnetometers show that the stones are indeed magnetic, as geological studies have confirmed. We recorded a particularly powerful jump in our magnetometer readings by holding the probe up to a fist-sized cluster of magnetite crystals, visible in one of the avenue sarsens.

If these stones were strictly for ceremonial purposes, the magnetic orientation of the stones would not be of consequence. However, the south pole of each stone faces the next stone in line as you move toward the circle. This arrangement means that the north poles of the stones generally point south, which are opposing the geomagnetic field. Inside the main and the minor stone circles, the south poles of all stones point at the next stone in the circle, in a clockwise direction with two exceptions. The stones at the two intact causeway entrances have their magnetic poles aligned with those of the avenue, rather than with the clockwise pattern of the circle, up to a ninety-degree difference from their companions in the ring. We measured all 67 remaining stones, with an average of 16 readings per stone. None had a detectable magnetic pole pointing in a direction that would contradict this pattern.³³

Duplicating this arrangement in the lab, we obtained a result fully consistent with the laws of electromagnetism, but utterly shocking. The aligned magnets channel airborne ions in one direction! This is the same principle used at Chicago’s Fermi Lab – America’s greatest circular atomic accelerator.

Today, physicists spend billions of dollars building circular tunnels with magnets, whose poles are aligned. We call them cyclotrons or colliders. They are built to move ions in one direction by making the magnets stronger and stronger as the ions move around the ring. Physicists use colliders to smash ions into targets so that they can study the debris of the collision and find the pieces that make up atoms.

At Avebury, c. 2500 BC, the prehistoric engineers also seemed to know how to do direct ions, but doubtless in search of a different end result.

So our tests show that the avenue stones seem designed to channel airborne ions between them into the central circle. The orientation of magnetic poles of the stones in the ring would then contain the ions by circling them around and around within the ring, just like in modern supercolliders, but at a lower speed. Elsewhere in England and Scotland, and at Carnac, massive stone rows also end in stone circles. The rows usually connect the circles to water,³⁴ where air is easily ionized.

Just inside one of Avebury’s major causeways was a small stone circle, surrounding a rectangle of standing stones – distinctive in these otherwise circular structures. Similar to what we saw at Windmill Hill, and later at Stonehenge, inside the rectangle were shallow, clay-lined pits. Neolithic farmers, we assume, put their seed into these pits, where the airborne ions would enhance them.

A potential problem would have been how to keep the ions from becoming ‘stalled’ at some point in the avenue by the opposite-acting poles of the magnetic stones. One way around this problem is to have the magnets become ever stronger. This solution may explain why the stones of the avenue grow in size as you approach the circle. This size patterning is also found at Carnac, Dorset, and other stone rows.

So is the ‘collider’ still at work today? Most of the stones are now missing, but consider the following and decide for yourself:

One day in 1993, at the southern end of Kennet Avenue, Nancy Talbott, of Massachusetts, felt compelled to stop her car on a dangerous blind curve and shoot a photo of something she didn’t consciously see at the time. When the film was developed, an anomalous ball appeared as a 12-foot-wide sphere of glowing white, situated in the middle of the avenue (Fig. 50). Analysis by photographic experts, using state of the art computer enhancement equipment, concluded that it was not a photographic artifact, but a real three-dimensional object, uniformly illuminated from within, probably an aerosol. In other words, it was much like a big ball of plasma, or electrically charged air.

Standing near the enclosure of Windmill Hill on another occasion, Talbott took two photographs of the opposite side of Avebury, revealing similar, if larger, glowing white spheres. None of her photos involved a flash. Glowing balls of light entering the ground or emerging from it, have also been seen several times at Avebury.³⁵

In 1823, three stones were removed from Avebury’s ring because “horses used to shy at them in the dusk of evening, and bolt down the bank”.³⁶ Horses are not the only creatures to have been frightened by the stones. There are numerous cases of present-day visitors who get electric shocks from touching the standing stones.³⁷ We know of similar cases of shocks from New England rock chambers.

It is not hard to see why the people, who built this giant henge, would select this particular spot. Now let us look at what they got for all their effort.

During the age of the megaliths, neither crop rotation, nor manure or any other fertilizer, was known. One would expect such farmers to have abandoned the soil after a few years. But excavations have shown that, during this age, the average field was in fact farmed for ten years. Modern experts fail to understand how they got an extra seven years of useful production.³⁸

As was discussed in Chapter 6, if yields from traditional crops could be tripled, just by exposing the seed to the energies at megalithic sites, then maybe we have found the answer.

In a pattern that must by now seem familiar, the people of Avebury quickly became rich. They were, in fact, richer than people anywhere else in Europe, with a single exception, the people of Carnac. Something was bringing wealth and distant visitors to the megalithic sites. Ceremonial stone axes from every Neolithic ax factory in England have been found in the Avebury area. In other words, people were streaming into this area from all over the country.

With the knowledge of Avebury’s physics behind us, it is so much easier now to look back and understand the purpose of the long stone rows of Carnac. If indeed seed was being treated in the ‘passage graves’ there, the tiny, enclosed space inside these enclosures would severely limit production capacity. In air and on ground that could be electrified by magnetic and seismic forces, the stone rows could gather and conduct airborne ions into the stone circles at the end of the rows. If the rows acted like the ones at Avebury, they could have increased the seed treating capacity of Carnac to a level that would be sufficient to cover much of France.

At any event, in England as well as in France, an economic and social revolution seems to have swept aside the old ways. The egalitarian burials of earlier eras gave way to burials where males had dramatically more valuable grave goods than women and children.³⁹Gold daggers of a striking craftsmanship so unique as to suggest a single master goldsmith have been found on the hips of males in both Avebury and Carnac. The men, probably the builders of the megalithic structures, were on the rise in the great game of social prestige.

Instead of dozens of long barrows with their egalitarian burials, we now have thousands of round barrows. Gone are the signs of any hereditary elite; instead we find the symptoms of a prosperous and populous new economic class. The round barrows were built, using the same clay layers as in Silbury Hill. Though thousands of them can be found on the Ordinance Survey maps of England, they occur overwhelmingly on the chalk aquifers. Most lie at the foot or on the crest of high bluffs, overlooking water. Modern aerial surveys of airborne electrostatic fields show that field strength peaks at such spots.⁴⁰

Apparently, the men who built the huge ‘generators of life’ chose to be buried in a smaller version of these. Perhaps this was the Neolithic equivalent of embalming. The desire to be buried in a small Silbury Hill may not have been mere symbolism, but more like a modern individual opting for the expensive embalming and lead-lined casket.

A new era had dawned, reaching from Carnac to the chalk aquifers of southern England. Was a new elite created through enhancing seed and, thereby, producing more food for the masses? Is this how they and their people thrived on such terrible soil?

The great authority Aubrey Burl reports that in the centuries following 2850 BC, both population and agricultural output in the area increased.⁴¹ This growth would approximately coincide with the completion of Silbury Hill and the first stages of the construction of Avebury.

Burgess⁴² states that Stonehenge was erected as competition to Avebury. Even the conservative authority Aubrey Burl considers it ‘tempting’ to view Stonehenge “as a monument intended to outdo Avebury”.⁴³

You would think that these new craftsmen would pick stones from Marlborough Downs, 30 miles to the north, littered with sarsens similar to those at Avebury. But they did not. They chose to go all the way to the Preseli Mountains in south-western Wales, 240 miles by land and sea. They traveled so far to collect bluestones, 82 of them, each weighing 4 tons.

English legend purports that Merlin the magician transported them through the air for King Arthur, for how else could they have gotten there? However, a quick glance at the map will reveal that the bulk of the route could be covered by raft along coastline and river with the stones then pulled overland only six miles. As we saw in Chapter 5, far greater feats of transport were achieved in South America, and have also been duplicated by modern archaeologists.

What is special about this Preseli bluestone is that it is magnetic. The name comes from the blue color the stones acquire when wet. They consist of the mineral dolerite, a magnetic rock. In addition, the builders brought stones of softer volcanic and calcareous ash, as well as rhyolite – all minerals more magnetic than the sandstone sarsens at Avebury.⁴⁴

At Stonehenge, 80 of the bluestones were placed in two concentric circles inside the ditch. Modern recreations, using only humans, poles, and ropes have determined how the stones could have been lifted into place.⁴⁵But when the work was three quarters completed, the project was abruptly halted. Neither circle was ever completed. It may have become clear that they were not efficient enough.

If magnetism was indeed the characteristic sought out in henge stones, as was apparently the case at Avebury, then a basic miscalculation may have been made in using bluestones. While they have perhaps four times the magnetic field strength of the sandstone sarsens, the chosen bluestones were much smaller. Magnetic field strength is a reflection of how many magnetic field lines pierce one cubic centimeter of an object. But if the aim is to conduct airborne ions on a selected path, a small powerful magnet does not outperform a weaker but larger one.

At Avebury, Stonehenge, and Carnac, the monoliths were not planted firmly in the ground. In the words of English authority Atkinson⁴⁶, “We know, however, that their builders were trying to achieve the maximum overall height with the material available, so that many of them stood in dangerously shallow holes and probably fell over at an early date.”

This consequence had to have been expected by the builders, but was considered a justifiable risk to get as much of the stone above ground as possible. The higher a stone stands above ground, the more air and therefore the more ions, it can interact with. So perhaps this was the crucial element in the effectiveness of a stone circle.

Did the stronger magnetism of the bluestones fail to compensate for their smaller size? After abandoning the bluestones, the builders went to Marlborough Downs in search of sarsen stones similar to Avebury’s. They dragged them 30 miles overland to Stonehenge, dressed them into their now-familiar shapes, and erected a stone circle, surrounding a horseshoe of trilithons 7 times larger than the bluestones. What the latest stones lacked in magnetic field strength, they more than made up for in size. They may have had one quarter the field strength, but four to seven times the bulk.

Unfortunately, the kind of polarity measurements that we performed at Avebury cannot be carried out at Stonehenge today due to the large steel revetments, inserted in the ground in the late 1950’s to shore up the stones. The high magnetism in this steel would overwhelm any readings of the lower magnetism of the stones.

In 1994, a survey of Stonehenge was made using a standard method of archaeological investigation, a ground resistivity survey.⁴⁷ The operator uses a device that sticks electrodes into the ground about one meter apart and then turning on an electric current. The device measures how well that artificially-induced current travels across that one meter of open ground. The current’s ability to travel is determined by how many free or easily-displaced electrons are in the molecules of the soil. The more there are, the better the conductivity.

Now, in our modern electric seed treatment, we have found that running a large voltage through the device moves out most of these free electrons, and it takes a while for them to be replaced through a connection to the ground. (If we have a high voltage and low voltage treatment to do the same morning, we try to do the low voltage one first for this reason). Something similar seems to be going on in Fig. 52.

We know that natural telluric current travels primarily in the top few feet of the ground, and that a modest ditch will block much of it. Therefore, there will be less conductivity of telluric current across a ditch. Most of the current will flow through the unbroken ground of the causeway, as we measured at Silbury Hill.

In Fig. 52, we see a precise mirror image of this. The dawn surge of telluric current across the causeway and into the henge’s circle would knock out many free electrons, which might not be replaced at the time the artificial stimulus of the resistivity meter was introduced. This would cause the meter to code that ground as more resistive, or dark. Conversely the ditch, which we know transmits natural telluric current worse than the causeway, would have less current move through it at dawn and retain more of its free electrons. This would cause the resistivity meter to measure that ground as lessresistive, even though we know it is the opposite; ditches block the flow of natural ground current.

Viewed in this light, what Fig. 52 shows is the expected result of telluric current rushing around the ditches, pouring in through the causeway (the gap in the ditch), and fanning out as it enters the henge circle.

Fig. 53 shows a fascinating overlap with Fig. 52. The small pits found in the ground at Stonehenge, which have never been explained, are located precisely where the rushing telluric current concentrates. If they once held seed, this is exactly where the seed would be exposed to the most telluric current, as it was concentrated by the structure of the henge. The only exception to this placement is the parallelogram of pits in Fig. 53, which happens to be located directly above the largest magnetic anomaly at Stonehenge.

On the inside, the surface of the upright stones was smoothed, and even curved, at great expense. If the aim was to contain and swirl ions around inside the stone ring, the curving and smoothing of the inner surfaces made great sense. So did the later re-use of the bluestones for an additional circle at the center.

The causeway was widened an extra 25 feet, allowing more ground current to enter. Fig. 52 may suggest why this was done. At the two o’clock position on the ring ditch, you can see that some resistance is still present where the chalk bedrock was originally cut. Yet the flow of dark over it shows that enough conductance was restored by filling in part of the ditch to continue the flow of ground current, perhaps eliminating what had become a bottleneck.

In Fig. 52, the stone ring shows up as a white, nearly circular stripe at the center, indicating poor conductivity immediately around the stones. Unfortunately, here the steel revetments throw off all magnetic readings, so we may never feel confident about this zone. Otherwise, the dark, highly conductive region enters the causeway, fans out, and moves around the stone circle.

An ‘avenue’ of shallow, parallel ditches were carved out to connect Stonehenge with the Avon River, two miles away and quite a few feet below. Historians suggest that it was laid out as a processional route. Rather, the path may follow the course of cracks in the chalk where the ground charge would be at maximum strength. The water of the river could be expected to have positive electric charge compared to the negatively charged higher chalk that had drained water out. The tendency for positive ground current to flow from low water to high chalk would pull the beneficial negative airborne ions along with it. The ditches would stop the ground current from dissipating in all directions and channel it – and the ions – along the length of the avenue.⁴⁸

Stonehenge ultimately won. Perhaps the architecture convinced people that it must be better. Maybe it gave better results because of constant remodeling of the design. Its engineers really never stopped tinkering with it.

Perhaps the constant avalanching of the bank into the pit at Avebury reduced its effectiveness. Eventually people there gave up maintaining the ditch, and by 1900 BC, Avebury seems to have been abandoned.⁵⁰

Stonehenge then reigned supreme for the next several centuries. Round barrow burials around it include men laid to rest with jewel-encrusted daggers and other artifacts of wealth. So here, too, people grew rich.

Around 1500 BC, after at least 700 years of continuous use, people finally stopped coming to Stonehenge. Signs of wealth and aristocracy rapidly disappeared.⁵¹No invasion occurred at that time to have subjugated the builders and forced them to abandon their lucrative lifestyles. There are no signs of warfare breaking out. Why suddenly give up such a good life?

This question had nagged at us, regarding the sites we visited around the world. It was the Achilles Heel of our hypothesis. If these sites so improved agricultural production, why would they ever have been abandoned?

What did happen at about the time that Stonehenge was abandoned was that fertilizer and crop rotation were introduced. English farmers realized that adding animal dung to your fields would keep them fertile.⁵²

This method seems to have been adopted almost simultaneously across the Old World – from China to Britain. At the same time, systematic growing of legumes like peas and Celtic beans was started, fixing nitrogen in the soil and regenerating its fertility.⁵³

With these discoveries, the farmer could now get improvement in yield without having to make the long trek to the henges. So, naturally, people stopped traveling to Stonehenge.

Chapter 10: Pulse of the pyramid

Siemens related a literally electrifying experience that he had on the summit of the Khufu Pyramid, the largest of Giza’s three pyramids. One of his Egyptian guides called his attention to the fact that anytime the guide raised his hand with fingers outstretched, they could hear an acute ringing noise. Raising just his index finger, Siemens felt an uncomfortable prickling sensation. As he tried to take a sip from his bottle of wine, he received a slight electric shock.

Improvising on the spot, he moistened a newspaper and wrapped it around the bottle of wine. This converted the bottle to a Leyden jar, one of the earliest typeaccumulators of electric charge. The bottle became increasingly charged with electricity, simply by being held over his head.

When sparks began to emerge from the wine bottle, his local guides accused him of witchcraft. One of them tried to seize Siemens’ companion, and in the ensuing struggle, Siemens touched the Arab with the bottle, giving him such a shock that he was knocked senseless to the ground, after which he scrambled to his feet and ran down the pyramid, shouting.²

As much as the giant pyramids of Egypt are like their megalithic cousins, they are also a special case. To understand why, we need to review the history of this unique kingdom.

After the passage of the last Ice Age, approximately 11,000 years ago, the Sahara changed from desert to an enormous expanse of open grasslands, very much like today’s African savanna further south. In these grasslands, big game species like elephant, giraffe, and antelope flourished, and so did the hunters who pursued them. Today we find, scattered throughout the world’s biggest desert, thousands of rock paintings from the millennia following the Ice Age. In graceful outlines, these paintings depict men with spears and bows bringing down antelope and gazelle.

About 4000 BC, however, the climate changed, and the Sahara began to revert to desert once again.³Most of the game disappeared along with the water, and the hunters were forced to move in pursuit of what remained. But even at a desert waterhole, one cannot kill enough game to feed a band of people.

The practice of agriculture had special appeal for humans in this situation. Farming had begun in Africa as early as 8000 BC, in the Ethiopian highlands.⁴But, as we have seen elsewhere, a special set of conditions had to exist for hunters to give up their nomadic ways and start farming. In the Sahara, at this time, oasis agriculture started wherever possible.

Nothing, however, could compare to the lure of the Nile.

From Lake Tana, in Ethiopia, originates another great river, the Blue Nile, winding its way through mountains to join the White Nile at Khartoum in Sudan. Along the way, countless other lakes contribute. From Khartoum, the combined Nile flows through high plateau and desert, rushing through a long series of great cataracts before entering what was Upper Egypt in ancient times.

Flanked by massive sandstone cliffs on either side, the river passes through present-day Aswan before widening into a lush, green valley that stands in striking contrast to the empty desert sands surrounding it. About 500 miles long and, until recently, not more than two miles wide, this verdant strip would always have been the obvious homeland of choice for anyone in north-eastern Africa who was looking for a place to farm.

In the days before the Aswan Dam, another well-known factor would give the Nile an almost supernatural allure for the farmer. Every year, the seasonal rains falling in the highlands of East Africa filter through a maze of streams and lakes week after week to slowly swell the Nile. By July, the river would flood Upper Egypt. Several weeks later, the surge would reach Cairo, inundating the valley there in October and November.

This seasonal drowning of the land brought it back to life. When the waters eventually receded, a layer of water-soaked black mud was left on the fields. This mud consisted of decaying organic matter that was swept from the banks of countless tributaries. It was as fertile as soil can be.

Unlike most rivers that will deliver this agricultural bonanza at unpredictable intervals and levels, the Nile throughout the ages, before it was dammed, has generally risen with a regularity and predictability that made its flood plain the envy of farmers everywhere. This regularity enabled the inhabitants of the valley to dig irrigation ditches, raise houses, and level fields, confident that their work was not in vain. Thus, in contrast to the rest of the Northern Hemisphere, Egyptians planted in late fall and harvested in spring and early summer, waiting for the fall floods to again deliver their bounty of rich, moist soil.

So rich was this ‘Gift of the Nile’, Herodotus tells us, that many early Egyptian farmers did not even have to plow the land. They merely cast their seed on the mud, then herded in flocks of sheep and goats who trod in the seed. It was said that nowhere else in the ancient world did farmers reap such bountiful crops with so little work. Not surprisingly, soon after the Sahara began to dry up around 5000 BC, the valley filled with people eager to embrace this new way of life.

Here a succession of kings, eventually known as pharaohs, ruled, and here they were buried along with their retainers and servants, entombed alive in the archaic rite of the God-King.

Most of what we know about early Egypt comes from these tombs. In the early royal cemetery at Saqqara they were called mastabas, rectangular, walled enclosures built of mud brick. Most scholarly histories of Egypt begin with the mastabas, move on to the pyramids, and generally follow the developments of architecture, war, and politics. In keeping with our theme, we intend to follow a chronology of the history of the land that was of far more importance to most Egyptians, be they peasant or noble.

About the time that the ditches were dug for the causewayed enclosure at Windmill Hill to combat the fertility crisis of southern England (Chapter 9), a similar crisis struck in the Nile Valley.

The wonderful predictability of the river floods failed. The climate of East Africa underwent a long-term alteration, causing the seasonal rains to decrease in volume.⁵From about 4800 to 3500 BC, the flood crest had remained fairly stable at about 20 feet above normal river level. Around 3300 BC, it dropped to 10 feet, where it stayed for several centuries.⁶

Ten feet, however, was actually a better level for farming: just enough to inundate most of the valley, but not enough to sweep away villages or tear apart field systems. As this was the period when the nation had united under the pharaoh, everyone prospered. Royalty and their officers most likely enjoyed popularity and the general support of the people. All evidence suggests that during this early period in Egyptian history, the basic arts were developed. Formalized systems of government, writing, art, mathematics, and astronomy were all in place. There is no record of civil unrest during this extended period.

However, not long after 3000 BC, the Nile began to show occasional low flood levels of much less than 10 feet, with little predictability.⁷We must bear in mind that, unlike farmers in most other river valleys, the ancient Egyptians never saw the rains that fed their river. These rains fell hundreds of miles to the south in the mountains.⁸

The farmers’ decisions on how deep to dig this year’s irrigation ditches, or which fields to concentrate on, were based solely on expectations of flood levels similar to previous levels. Before and during the First Dynasty c. 3050-2890 BC, the decisions had been correct. Then everything changed. Little is known about the exact reasons behind the ascension of the Second Dynasty, but is it only coincidence that at about the time the river fell, so too did the First Dynasty?

During the reign of the Second Dynasty (2890-2686 BC), the water level of the Nile continued to drop. By 2800 BC, its flood levels were down to 5 feet above normal, half the level of what had sustained the early unified nation. As Rushdi Said explains⁹, “A single failure of the flood … could cause enormous misery and could leave an impact on the psyche of the nation.”

Shaduf, Egypt’s ancient method of raising water in a skin bag tied to a levered pole and then pouring it into a field, was as yet undiscovered. While some of the water loss could be offset by using Mesopotamian style gravity-flow irrigation ditches, the loss of the fertile mud could not be replaced. The discovery of crop rotation and animal manure fertilizer lay far in the future, and, after all, these farmers had never had any need of either.¹⁰

On other continents, the early farmers could move to another region when the situation worsened. That option was not possible in the Nile Valley. Walk one or two miles in any direction and you would stand in rocky desert sands. There was no alternative to the valley.

Doubtless, the situation did not deteriorate immediately. The soil was so rich that it probably could have been farmed for some years without soil replacement. Wheat and barley were the mainstays of their diet, and we have seen that it takes years to exhaust the soil in Europe and Mesopotamia, whose people were growing the same crops. Occasionally, the Nile would still flood to almost 10 feet and renew most of the fields. Some unfarmed portions of the valley remained that were undoubtedly pressed into service.

No one had ever seriously tried to farm in the water-rich delta to the north, because swamps make poor farmland for wheat and barley, which both like good drainage. Pulses, such as peas and lentils that could have restored nitrogen to the soil, were traditionally grown separately under fruit trees in gardens on the high ground above the flood plain.¹¹

After a few centuries of falling flood levels, soil exhaustion musthave set in. No one knows exactly why the Second Dynasty fell, but at this point, it was replaced by the Third Dynasty (2686-2613 BC), ruled by Pharaoh Djoser (or Zoser). During his reign, a 7-year famine swept Egypt.¹²Things went from bad to worse, as the waters of the river still fell.

By now it must have been clear to Djoser that the situation was desperate. Not only would his people continue to die if something was not done, his reign or the reign of his descendants would no doubt be rudely interrupted. His reaction?

He built the first pyramid in the world. Legend has it that he summoned Imhotep to design a tomb for him. Imhotep was, seemingly, the greatest genius in the long history of Egyptian civilization. The Greeks credit him with creating the field of medicine. His actual titles included Chief of the Observers (head astronomer), Chief of Architects, Chief of Carpenters, and, most intriguingly for our purpose, High Priest of Annu.¹³

This is a natural myth from a people who lived on tiny ‘islands’ of raised land during the flood season, waiting for the waters to recede so that they could go out and seed the land.

At the most sacred temple in Egypt, the Shrine of the Phoenix, stood a small hill revered as the original Annu. Imhotep was head priest at this shrine, which was the center of Egypt’s priesthood and its secret learning. The town here was later named Heliopolis by the Greeks in accordance with the sun worship prevalent at that time. At the heighest point of Annu was a stone pillar, connecting Earth to Atum.

At the beginning of the pyramid age, an even more sacred object, a black and pointed rock, called the Benben Stone, was placed on top of the pillar.¹⁵(Fig. 54)

This stone was supposed to be the perch for the Phoenix, the mythological bird symbolizing Osiris, the god of rebirth.¹⁶ (Fig. 55) The Egyptian name for the Phoenix was Bennu. The root word ben was generally used to denote sexual, procreational, or seeding ideas such as semen, copulation, and, more important for us, fertilizer.¹⁷Ben is still used today in Semitic languages like Arabic and Hebrew to mean ‘son’.

The original Benben Stone is long gone. In later depictions, it is shaped like a pyramid, with the Phoenix perched on top. But in the earliest known depiction, its sides are bulging and rounded, suggestive of a conical shape rather than pyramidal.

Many Egyptologists think that the Benben was actually an oriented iron meteorite.¹⁸Occasionally, an iron meteorite does not tumble on entering the atmosphere, possibly because an irregularity in its shape stabilizes it in one direction due to airflow over it. Whatever the cause, once the meteor becomes fixed in position, the heat of air friction ablates or erodes it in a non-uniform way. The result is a black, pear-shaped mass, similar to the giant Willamette Meteorite in the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Occasionally, the results of this process are more extreme and create a cone of iron, like the Morito Meteorite in the Institute of Metallurgy in Mexico City.

Since ancient times, meteorites have been widely regarded as sacred objects. For the Greeks, Delphi was the navel of the world. The Omphalos Stone had been placed on the spot where Kronos originally had cast an object down, called Zeus Baetylos, which historians generally take to mean ‘meteorite’. At Gythium, the inhabitants called their sacred stone Zeus Kappotas, meaning ‘Zeus fallen down.’ Pliny, the Roman historian, reports that “a stone which fell from the sun” was worshipped at Potideae and that others had fallen at Aigos-Potamus and Abdos. Black stones, said to have fallen from the sky, were revered throughout Syria. At Emessa (Homs), one of these meteorites was also conical. In ancient Phrygia, now in central Turkey, the goddess Cybele was represented by a stone like this, and her cult was carried by the Romans as far as France and England.¹⁹

The highest wish of all Muslims is to go on a haj (pilgrimage) to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, because that city houses the central shrine, the Ka’aba. The Ka’aba in turn houses the most sacred object in Islam, a black meteorite, which was an object of ancient reverence even before Mohammed was born. When he and his followers took Mecca in 630 AD, he had the pagan idols surrounding the stone destroyed, but embraced the stone itself as the sacred gift of God to Adam.

The Egyptian cult was, at least in Thebes, known to be centered on a black, conical iron meteorite. Therefore, we should not be surprised if one ended on top of the Pillar of Atum in the Shrine of the Phoenix.²⁰Most important to our thesis, however, is what later happened to the Benben Stone.

Fig. 55. The traditional Egyptian Phoenix, called Bennu, was represented by an ibis or, as here, a heron, both sacred birds. Bennu was often depicted perching atop the Benben Stone. (Illustration: Public domain)

 

The electrified wind

Unlike historians, who concentrate on the symbolic aspects of meteorites, we wish to consider the physical characteristics. All metals, including iron, are extremely efficient conductors of electricity. And, as we know from Silbury Hill and Central American pyramids, limestone can be a reasonably effective conductor if any trace metals are present. In the shrine of Atum where the pyramid architect Imhotep was high priest, it looks like an iron meteorite sat atop a limestone pillar. Let us look in detail, however, at the environmental facts in Egypt. Unlike the historical aspects of the country, these are still present today and can be studied and confirmed.

Every spring, out of the Sahara, comes a powerful wind, the khamsin. This wind is always hot and dry, and can blow at gale force for days at a time, often raising dangerous dust storms. Such winds are invariably filled with an excess of positively charged ions.²¹The similar shirav, the desert wind in Israel, is so laden with positive ions that it wreaks havoc with the mental and physical health of 30% of the population, who, incidentally, are effectively treated by inhaling large doses of negative ions.^{22, 23}

Any time that sand particles are blown around by this type of wind, the friction between these semi-conducting silicon bits adds to the electrostatic charge of the wind. March through June is khamsin season in Egypt, with April and May being the peak months. The wind may strike without warning at any time during this period.

Earth is predominantly electrically negative, acting like a huge sink of electrons. As we also know, negative and positive ions attract and forcefully interact. Now consider the following quote from a scientist with long research experience in this field,²⁴ “When a metal needle is subjected to a strong negative charge, electrons begin to escape rapidly from its sharp point, i.e. an avalanche of electrons of high kinetic energy is caused. This process is enhanced by molecules of atmospheric oxygen owing to the property of oxygen atoms to ‘extract’ electrons from metals. This phenomenon is known as electron or electrostatic emission. We used sharp needles because the quantity of electricity is directly proportional to the square root of the surface curvature.”

In other words, a powerful enough concentration of electric charge in the ground, if linked to a sharp metal object, will efficiently cause ionization of the air. This is essentially what happens when a church steeple draws lightning to it along the path of least resistance, a channel of ionized air. Actually, in the case of lightning, it is normally a positive charge in the ground that concentrates in tall, thin objects and attracts the negatively charged lightning bolt. But this process works even more efficiently in the opposite direction and helps explain why the occasional upward ground-to-cloud bolt is far more powerful.

Sometimes tall, thin objects will not attract a bolt of lightning. Instead they will begin to glow, and the glow can continue for hours. This is known as brush discharge or corona discharge and is essentially the same process as above, but without the buildup and explosive release of charges that yield lightning bolts. Historically known as St. Elmo’s fire, this glow has been reported countless times by sailors on mastheads and yardarms.

Now picture a pointed meteorite of nearly pure iron perched high atop a limestone pillar on top of a hill during a khamsin gale. The positively charged wind will tend to act like the base of the thundercloud, drawing negative charge from the ground. And, as we saw in Chapter 9, water draining through carbonaceous aquifers like chalk or limestone creates negative electric charge in the ground.

The khamsin blows during the months of the lowest Nile River levels. Thus, it occurs when much water has drained through the many-layered limestone aquifers that underlie the river valley and slope up its banks to the flanking high ground. There would be numerous electrons from the ground free to concentrate at the tip of the raised meteorite. The resulting build-up of opposite charges would be a perfect lightning scenario in a thunderstorm, but Lower Egypt averages fewer than three thunderstorms per year. During the much more prevalent khamsin winds, however, the Pillar of Atum, topped by the Benben Stone, would present an ideal situation for visible brush discharge, presenting quite a spectacle to anyone looking at it.

To support our theory, let us look at the building of the Aswan Dam in the late 1960’s, the last time Nile River levels crashed. For three years after completion of the dam, the water level of the Nile was extremely low, while the reservoir behind the dam filled up.²⁵Water would drain down inside the limestone aquifers of the valley.

Today, the Shrine of the Phoenix, with its Benben Stone atop a limestone pillar, no longer exists, but nearby the limestone walls of the Church of St. Mary point towards the sky. During these three years, in the khamsin month of May and during the following low water months of the summer, the dome of the church would often glow, and, occasionally, small balls of light would flow in the air. These phenomena were watched by thousands, sometimes for hours, and were often photographed.^26,27,28

Research by J.S. Derr and M.A. Persinger²⁹revealed that the more persistent events here were “coronal type displays that were situated primarily over the apical structures of the church.”

In other words, at the highest point near the site of the former temple of Annu brush discharges occurred where negative ground charge met positively charged atmosphere. Derr and Persinger were particularly struck by the “relatively sudden onset and persistence of the luminous phenomena.” Their statistical analysis showed linkage with earthquakes hundreds of miles upstream, likely triggered by the immense weight of water building up behind the dam.

Regarding the glow atop the church, they concluded that “the failure to find strong daily relationships between luminous phenomena and either seismic or geomagnetic activity suggests that some fundamental variable has not been accommodated. (…) We suspect that this factor may be coupled to the mechanism that precipitates the actual occurrence of the strain field.”

We agree that the weight of the newly accumulated water in Lake Nasser caused the earthquakes, but we firmly believe that the persistent coronal discharges at the Church of St. Mary were set off by the falling water tables in the limestone along the banks, combined with the khamsin winds.

Fertilizer from the sky

Imagine yourself for a moment as an Ancient Egyptian. When the Benben Stone, the most sacred object of your culture, would begin to mysteriously glow and give off sparks, it certainly fulfills one requirement of religion – the evocation of awe. Other effects of this electrostatic discharge for those standing nearby would be hair standing on end, and a tingling or prickling of the skin.

Downwind from the pillar, many of the positive ions in the air would have been neutralized by the electrons escaping from the meteorite’s tip. The sickening effects of the khamsin would be far less pronounced here. The smell of ozone could be detected, and its presence would mean separation of the molecules in the air had taken place, a universal effect of electrostatic discharge. Our atmosphere is rich in nitrogen, but in a form that plants cannot use. Brush discharge will ionize the nitrogen molecules of the air to become nitrates, readily usable by cereal plants.

In other words, these electrical forces would have another effect of vital importance to Egypt, they would provide airborne fertilizer. Farmers around the world have long recognized this effect. To the Hopi of south-western United States, nothing is more welcomed than having their fields fertilized by the Sky God in the form of lightning. The Hopi know that crops will grow better when this occurs. This belief was dismissed by European-Americans as superstition. Now we know that lightning striking a small field can leave behind free nitrogen equivalent to one or two years’ worth of fertilizer. Remember Tlaloc (Chapter 4), the Aztec god of both lightning and fertility?

For much of the khamsin period, the Benben Stone might well have been releasing free nitrogen into the air. For much of the remaining year, it might instead have released negative oxygen ions, exactly like the ion generator in our living room. Negative ions themselves dramatically boost the growth, and probably the yield, of plants.³⁰ We do know that when a pointed structure is charged enough to glow, a plume of ions will be carried downwind.³¹

So may we not assume that a priest or a gardener in the gardens of the Shrine of the Phoenix would notice how much better plants fared on the downwind side of the temple? During most of the year, a gentle wind blows from the north. If this wind carried negative oxygen ions with it, the plants on the southern side of the shrine should have been taller, greener, and firmer. The khamsin, on the other hand, blows from the south and southwest. If it carried free nitrogen to the gardens or fields north and northeast of the temple, the plants here should have fared even better than those to the south during the period of low Nile floods.

This fact would certainly have been linked with the glow at the tip of the Benben Stone during khamsins. Most likely, this glow would not occur throughout the khamsin but rather when ground and air charges were right. If these conditions happened only occasionally, it would likely be remembered that plants were affected when the Benben Stone glowed.

Father of the pyramid

As mentioned before, Imhotep, High Priest of the Shrine of the Phoenix, was summoned by Pharaoh Djoser. Tradition holds that Djoser wanted a grand tomb for himself, but we think there was more to it than that. Since Imhotep was not only the Pharaoh’s vizier but also Chief Architect and Chief Carpenter of the realm, he was the right man for the job.

All the previous pharaohs’ tombs had been rectangular mastabas, entirely constructed of mud brick, and having flat roofs. Imhotep decided to build a vastly more expensive and labor-consuming structure. A rectangle of limestone blocks was erected, followed by a slightly smaller rectangle of stone atop the first one, and so on for a total of six levels, a so-called step pyramid.

This pyramid, like all Egyptian pyramids, was not built by slaves. Most historians today agree that they were erected by volunteer farmers during the flood months of October and November when they were idled by the inundation of the fields. Somehow during the decades of the great famine, these farmers were motivated to spend several months year after year, building the biggest structure ever made by man until then.

Djoser’s step pyramid (Fig. 56) was the second structure in the world to be built of carefully cut and quarried blocks of stone, fitting tightly together. The limestone used was cut locally on the West Bank, where much dolomite is found.^{32, 33}

Dolomite is limestone with a manganese content above 25%. Our own laboratory tests have shown that dolomite is a good conductor of electricity. We have found that the conductivity of limestone is in direct proportion to its content of manganese. So Djoser’s pyramid was made of highly conductive blocks, fitted tightly together.

We will never know if anything lay atop this pyramid, but we do know that the later, pointed pyramids had, at their apex, a stone of polished black granite, called benben, bearing the image of the Phoenix. Because of their pyramid shape, they were named pyramidions by Egyptologists.

If the pyramid of Djoser had merely a symbolic granite image of the original Benben Stone, it might have functioned much like Silbury Hill. If the benben was real iron, it would produce a greatly magnified version of the ion effects that we suppose were present at the Shrine of the Phoenix, possibly enough to substantially improve crop yields. Imhotep probably knew of this effect.

Another symptom suggesting that the intention of building Djoser’s pyramid was to have a generator of ions and free nitrogen, is the fact that it was 90% completed when the builders started all over again. As at Silbury Hill, someone decided it now had to be twice the size.

Was some effect absent that Imhotep had hoped to achieve? The grandeur of its appearance could have been judged long before it was 90% complete. But its physical effects could only be judged once it was essentially finished.

 

Fig. 56. Djoser’s pyramid was only the second structure in the world to be built of carefully cut and quarried blocks of stone, fitting tightly together. First a rectangle of limestone blocks was constructed, on top of that a slightly smaller rectangle, and so on for a total of six levels – a so-called step pyramid. (Photo copyright © by Kaj Halberg)

But, to begin with, there is nothing preventing the giant pyramids from having had two functions, one symbolic and one practical. Now, one essential problem with the theory that these huge structures were built specifically to be royal burial places is that there are no bodies to support it. No pharaoh’s remains have ever been found in the large pyramids. Not even one. The only remains found proved to be later insertions of corpses, hundreds of years later, similar to the pattern we have seen in France and England.

Most of the so-called ‘burial chambers’ were built around a giant sarcophagus, and afterwards they seem to have been sealed up forever. Many of the chambers were even left unfinished, mere caverns of crudely chipped limestone. Some of the finished ones were sloppy in execution with measurements and angles showing tremendous variation – nothing like the incredible precision, which typified the pyramid itself. At most, in these chambers, archaeologists found an empty sarcophagus often without a lid. ‘Grave robbers’, we are told, carried off the rest. However, if the burial chambers were optional, and not the primary purpose for construction, that would explain why some of the chambers would be left unfinished or unused.

Sekhemkhet, Djoser’s successor, began building a pyramid that rose only 25 feet before being abandoned. When it was discovered in 1951, the chamber beneath it created a great stir because it was discovered intact. A corridor leading to the chamber was filled with thousands of animal bones, reminiscent of Avebury.

When Dr. Zakaria Goneim broke through the intact walls of the chamber, he found an underground hall, hewn roughly from the limestone bedrock. In the center there stood an exquisitely polished sarcophagus of alabaster, completely sealed. An ancient bouquet, left atop it, had crumbled to dust – proving that the sarcophagus had remained undisturbed.

Four months later, an official delegation of government representatives, archaeologists, and journalists were gathered for the formal opening. As they collectively held their breath, the alabaster lid was levered off the sarcophagus with much trouble, and everyone stared in shock. This never-opened sarcophagus was completely empty. Clearly, the ‘burial’ was symbolic.

As we have seen over and over again, common themes, symbols, and structures arose repeatedly in different locales. The ‘burial chambers’ inside or below the Egyptian pyramids resemble the Meso-American model, where pyramids were erected over sacred caves, quite likely fertility caves. And we have seen repeatedly in France, England, and Meso-America the use of corpses or bones for internment in a mound, rock chamber, or pyramid. We have also seen the close connection between the bones/corpses and fertility.

Might the Egyptian kings have helped fire up their people’s enthusiasm for building the pyramids by promising to lend their own corpses to increase the power of the pyramid? The kings would likely have been informed by the engineers that the actual presence of the corpse was unnecessary. Perhaps the elite preferred to let the common people believe this useful myth.

The theory that these early, giant pyramids were tombs arose from our knowledge of the much smaller pyramids of the Fifth Dynasty (2494-2345 BC), built several hundred years later. Extensive numbers of hieroglyphics inside these pyramids, as well as a temple of that era, inform us that they werein fact the final resting place of their pharaohs, and some of them did contain bodies.

If indeed the great pyramids of the Forth Dynasty (2613-2494 BC) were burial chambers, then why are they mute regarding the pharaohs whose monumental tombs they supposedly were? No one has found the names of the pharaohs inscribed on these structures.

Our knowledge of who constructed a particular pyramid has come from workmen’s scribbles in obscure places inside the pyramids, or from later Egyptian records, unlike the Fifth Dynasty pyramids. It is not that the Fourth Dynasty was shy about public use of hieroglyphics. Pillars, called stelae, were erected throughout Egypt, covered with hieroglyphics that in detail describe various historical events and the accomplishments of the reigning pharaoh.

The situation is reminiscent of the Mayan pyramids described in Chapter 4, which became non-utilitarian, political structures after a century of foreign occupation where the society dissolved and the knowledge of the fertility-generating properties of the pyramids seemingly was lost.

In Egypt, the great pyramids were hurried into service from about 2650 BC to perhaps 2400 BC, while the Nile continued its poor performance, only to reach a terrible low around 2200 BC. For nearly two centuries, it failed to flood at all. Devastating famines finished the pharaoh’s mandate, and the Egyptian people turned their back on the Fourth Dynasty. From the ensuing chaos, the Fifth Dynasty eventually arose, two hundred years later.

The pyramids of the Fifth Dynasty are truly puny, compared with the earlier giant structures. They were of the shoddiest construction and haphazardly scattered. Instead of solid, quarried blocks, these later imitations had a core of loose piles of rubble that have shifted over the centuries, causing many to collapse. There is no reason to link these tiny affairs with the earlier pyramids.

Egyptologist John Wilson of Chicago University summed up his view of this degeneration as follows,³⁴ “The several pyramids of the Third and Forth Dynasties far surpass later pyramids in technical craftsmanship. Viewed as the supreme efforts of the state, they show that the earliest historical Egypt was once capable of scrupulous intellectual honesty. For a short time, she was activated by what we call the ‘scientific spirit’, experimental and conscientious. After she had thus discovered her powers and the forms which suited her, the spirit was limited to conservative repetition, subject to change only within known and tested forms.”

As previously mentioned, until now the Nile delta had been ignored as arable land. But during the Fourth Dynasty, vast royal estates were cultivated here to augment the nation’s agricultural production in order to provide food for the laborers building the pyramids.³⁵

The Fourth Dynasty was the zenith of the Pyramid Age. In terms of volume, 80% of all Egyptian pyramids were erected during the 120 years of this dynasty. The first king, Sneferu (‘Bringer of Beauty’), was credited with not one but three pyramids, none of which, incidentally, held his remains. And again, Sneferu did not put his name on any of these three structures. He expanded and completed the step pyramid at Meidum, converting it to the first example of the ‘true’ pyramid structure with four flat, smoothly sloping sides rising to a common point.

He also ordered two pyramids to be erected just south of Saqqara, at Dashour, by far the biggest built until then. The larger of the two, the Red Pyramid, is made of a reddish limestone, loaded with iron, and, therefore, highly conductive to electrical current. Any khamsin-driven movements of ions or airborne nitrogen from the peaks of this pair would likely have settled around the capital of Memphis, reinforcing the effect of Djoser’s pyramid on the crops of the capital area.

The pyramid builders were, of course, fully human and prone to less than perfect ways. It appears that the outer casing of the Meidum pyramid collapsed when it was about halfway finished. In the famous Bent Pyramid, the builders altered the angle of ascension midway through construction. Some Egyptologists think that the builders, after the collapse at Meidum, feared that the steeper angle could not support the building. Others hypothesize that the pyramid had to be completed in a rush, and the lower angle would require less stone. ‘Rush’ definitely became the word most identified with construction of the Forth Dynasty pyramids.

Building three giant pyramids during a reign of about 30 years had to tax Sneferu’s people sorely. The two at Dashour alone contain 7.6 million tons of limestone blocks. With an average weight of 2.5 tons each, this meant 3,000,000 blocks. If the construction went on every single day during his 30-year reign, it would amount to the cutting, moving, and setting of 300 blocks a day. But we must remember that most of the work probably took place during the two or three months a year when the farmers were idle. This would equal approximately 1,500 blocks a day, assuming the construction took place over the full 30 years.

The common image of slaves hauling stone sledges, driven by the lash and enduring horrible conditions, was probably reinforced by these kinds of computations. Who else would put up with this? And though we know that the pharaoh was an absolute ruler, Sneferu had just been swept into power to replace the previous ‘absolute’ ruler. He was well aware of the limits of such power during food shortages.

To us, the most amazing thing about Sneferu is not that he was able to perform these engineering miracles but rather that historical records indicate he was well-loved by the very people whom he seems to have driven remorselessly.³⁶

Said tells us,³⁷ “In case of good governments which stored grain surpluses in years of good Nile to dispense them in years of poor Nile, conditions became worse only when there were two or more consecutive failures of the Nile.”

Of the six recordings of Nile flood levels from the reign of Sneferu, half of these were below the proper level.³⁸If this sample is representative of the period, then Egyptian agriculture, and therefore, also its people, were in dire straits indeed. Suddenly it becomes much easier to imagine how the people could be mobilized for these Herculean labors, suggesting that they may have known of some specific benefit from them.

The Khufu Pyramid (Figs. 57-58), also called The Great Pyramid, stood 500 feet high, the height of a 50-story-building. Its perimeter is more than a thousand yards, and its 570,000 square feet base is enough to hold the Cathedrals of Florence, Milan, St. Peter’s, St. Paul’s, and Westminster Abbey put together.³⁹

Khufu’s successor, Khafre, built a near twin. Just a few feet shorter, but built on a slightly higher part of the plateau, it looks even higher than Khufu’s. As a monument to himself, Khafre would have produced a far more imposing appearance by standing this giant off on its own, but he chose not to. Was there a functional reason?

The third pyramid of Giza is associated with Khafre’s successor, Menkaure, and is truly puny compared with the other two. At 200 feet, it is less than half the height. At 0.6 million tons, it is one tenth of the mass of the others.

Giza is a large limestone plateau, artificially leveled to support not only Khufu’s champion, but also the other two pyramids. Earth moving on such a gargantuan scale, preparing a level base for all three pyramids, suggests a master plan, with Imhotep, traditionally suggested as the author, by now deceased. John Legon convincingly shows that the three were planned as a group.⁴⁰

All pyramids were built with an electrically conducting core of coarse local limestone with a high content of magnesium. These core blocks are what we see today, the sides being anything but smooth. However, in the 13th Century Moslems tore off the outer casing and used it for building materials as the start of an ultimately abandoned effort to destroy these pagan structures.

In only a few spots can we still see the beautiful, snow-white, fine Tura limestone that made up the outer casing. This stone was finer-grained than the stone employed in the core, and polished to a sheen. It came from the East Bank of the Nile and had to be ferried across. Most of the giant pyramids were ultimately encased in Tura limestone. We find this intriguing, because, in contrast to the core limestone, Tura limestone contains only traces of manganese and therefore is an extremely poor conductor of electricity.⁴¹In fact, it acts as an insulator.

What we have then, is a massive pyramid of electrically conducting limestone blocks, cloaked in an insulating outer layer. This combination would prevent any of the electrical charge in the core from leaking off into the air.

The Tura casing blocks are one of the greatest engineering wonders of the ancient world. They were polished on all sides to within 1/100th of an inch accuracy, fitting together so snugly that you cannot get a razor blade between them, five thousand years later. The labor involved in this creation was extraordinary. The builders either had an incredible fetish for precision, or this precision was functionally important.

With this tight insulating cover, the only place the electrical charge could leak out would be through the benben, at the apex of the pyramid. All negative charge, spread throughout its entire base would be concentrated in one pointed capstone, possibly of pure iron.

On a pointed hill or mountain, as shown in Fig. 4, Chapter 2, the positive electrical field lines of the atmosphere that would normally be spread out across the entire base, are concentrated at the peak, and the negative charge of the ground will likewise concentrate at a peak. The steeper the peak, the more concentrated are the electrical field lines. Scientists have also found that in Nature by far the highest electrical readings were obtained near the edges of sharp rocks.⁴² We have confirmed this effect on The Lost World Pyramid in Guatemala (Chapter 4).

In this context, it is fascinating to note that Egyptian pyramid builders always tried to make the steepest slopes that would remain structurally sound, namely about 52 degrees.

As mentioned before, nearly all the insulating cover of Tura limestone is today gone. The exposed limestone blocks of the conducting core should dissipate much of the electrical charge from inside the pyramid through their exposed edges. After all, any sharp edge concentrates electrical charge and becomes a point where the charge bleeds off into the surrounding air. Again, this has been confirmed by us in Guatemala.

So, in fact, any electric charge moving up inside the pyramid today, will never reach the peak in any large concentration. Additionally, the pointed capstones have long since disappeared. At the summit of the Khufu Pyramid we now see a flat area, several meters across. This current, deteriorated form cannot concentrate charge to anywhere near the degree of the original pointed top.

However, even in this ruined condition electrical effects have been noted, for example the story at the beginning of this chapter regarding Siemens’s electrically charged bottle.

A question that has long puzzled Egyptologists is why Giza was chosen as a building site. All previous pyramids were built well to the south, near the capital of Memphis. Why then this change? Once again, a study of the topography involved may shed some light.

The Giza plateau itself is the intersection of two major limestone layers, the Mokkatam and the Maadi.⁴⁴All three pyramids were placed in a line(Fig. 59), atop the plateau where multiple aquifer layers surface,⁴⁵ in other words, atop an interfluve.

The larger the base of the pyramid, the more ground current from the interfluve would be concentrated at the apex. The insulating Tura limestone cover would ensure that all charge rose toward the apex, without leaking out around the sides. The positively charged khamsin wind would create a condition at the peak ideal for an electric brush discharge. The concentrated negative charge, accumulated from the drained limestone aquifers would connect with the oppositely charged wind.

Not only would the top glow, it would release ionized nitrogen downwind to the farms.

The siting of the three Giza pyramids also suggests a reason for the selection of this particular plateau. It reminds us of the geological locations of Avebury and Silbury Hill (Fig. 44, Chapter 9).

The Giza pyramids are all lined up along a tongue or ‘peninsula’ of the Mokkatam formation limestone. The building stones were quarried right where the quarries would act in a manner similar to a huge henge ditch. They cut into the peninsula’s side, thereby narrowing it. This placement would further amplify the ‘peninsula effect’ discussed in Chapter 2. The result was to leave the giant Khufu pyramid with a base that covered most of the intact tongue of the Mokkatam formation.⁴⁶ The physics at work should function much like an undisturbed causeway in a henge, concentrating the ground current of the whole peninsula in this small piece of intact ground.

One night, in a pitch-black room, we noticed that our electric ion generator not only had the distinctive purple glow at the tip of the needle, indicating that air ionization was taking place, but also an extremely faint, second pinpoint of purple light, a couple of inches off to the side. This turned out to be a tiny, secondary needle we had never even noticed before. When we tried covering one of the needles with a finger, the purple glow on the other needle would wink out. It didn’t matter whether we covered the major one or the minor one. Eliminating one always killed the other.

A phone call to the technical department of the manufacturer revealed that the smaller needle was a reduced, low-power version of the main needle. It turned out that the early, single needle ion generators had spread ions uniformly in all directions. This was a disadvantage to the homeowner who usually would place the unit on a table near a wall. Over time, the stream of ions hitting the wall tended to dirty it with all the dust particles they attract. The presence of a smaller low-power needle created an electric field that directed the ions from the major needle in one direction. Placing the small needle on the large one’s south side would tend to direct the ions east and north. We wondered if this process could explain the placement of the pyramids.

The farmlands where the ionized nitrogen was needed, lay east of the pyramids, stretching in a long line north and south. When you think about it, the Nile Valley is a tough target to hit, if what you are ‘firing’ has to be based outside the valley. Not enough loft, and you only reach the fields next to the pyramid. Too much loft and you overshoot the whole valley. Going due east only hits a narrow swath of the valley’s length. Northeast and southeast would be the ideal trajectory, if you want to cover the maximum amount of farmland.

The khamsin blows towards the north and northeast. As farmlands expanded north up the valley to the delta, the pyramids were situated where they would do most good. And if the subsidiary pyramids worked like the small needle in ion generators, they would also have tended to direct the khamsin flow off the main pyramid to the north and northeast.

Let us assume that Imhotep did want to build giant generators of ions and free nitrogen. Due to the concentration of positive atmospheric field lines at the peak, the benben atop would always be exposed to an airspace of higher positive charge than any area around it. During khamsin periods, this positive field in the air would be dramatically enhanced. This is also the time of the year when the negative electrical charge in the ground should be at its maximum. Therefore, the pyramids are sited where the electrical scenario is the most conducive to an outcome that the infertile fields would need most.

From the chambers, long, narrow shafts radiated out through the pyramid. The chambers were sealed shut, as were the shafts. While they came to be called airshafts, these foot-wide tunnels were blocked on both ends and so never transported air.

However, both they and the chambers did have stagnant air trapped inside. This air would be ionized or electrified by the natural radioactivity from the granite, becoming veins of electrical charge lacing the inside of the pyramid. The air would also receive electrical input from the general electric current flowing from pyramid base to peak. It brings to mind the electrified ‘veins’ of the drains inside the Akapana pyramid of Tiwanaku (Chapter 5) and of the sculpted Olmec hill at San Lorenzo (Chapter 1).

The shafts were an architect’s or engineer’s nightmare, because the cut stones of the pyramid core had to have appropriate sections of the shafts cut through them at just the right angle and height. Try to imagine the complexity of designing this, cutting the many stones in the appropriate way, and then seeing that those particular stones got placed in exactly the right spots. It’s enough to make us think that they must have had some substantial value to the builders. But just what exactly?

We wonder if these shafts may have acted like a car battery. After all, once your car is running, you don’t need a battery until you stop. Then, if your alternator is not working perfectly, your engine may die because there was an interruption in the electrical supply to the spark plugs.

During the khamsin wind, there had to be lulls between gusts and periods of weak wind on some days. Likewise, the negative electric charge from the ground into the base would vary with the time of the day, strongest at sunrise and perhaps sunset, weakest near mid-day, like ground currents anywhere.

Could the shafts have helped to maintain the electrical activity of the pyramid on a more constant basis during these periods of partial interruption or lulls? It is only speculation, but it at least has the virtue of accounting for why the builders would go to such extraordinary lengths to incorporate these comparatively tiny features.

There is one symbol among the pyramids, an icon so large that it does justice to the blank pyramids. The Sphinx is what archaeologists call a were-cat. It is half lion (the body), half human (the face). We realized that we had seen such icons elsewhere. A central symbol in the cultures of the Olmec and Mayan pyramid builders, and also of the Andean civilizations of Tiwanaku and later the Inca, was that of a were-cat, part jaguar and part man. Virtually all experts today agree that this were-cat was a symbol of fertility. It appeared several places near the stone fertility generators where we had measured energies.

And now, the biggest were-cat in the world sits like a sentinel at Giza.

The inevitable conclusion is that the great Egyptian pyramids were fertility generators. They constituted the practical response of a practical people to a crisis that threatened their lives. This explains why the Egyptian people time and again willingly undertook construction projects that defy our imagination. The building of the pyramids was an agricultural people’s desperate bid for survival. After all, fear of famine is a supreme motivator.

Let us finish by casting our mind’s eye back 4,500 years. The pyramids glow a brilliant white in the desert sun by day and, perhaps, glow visibly from the peak by night. Even today, light phenomena are still seen, most commonly on the far side of the Giza pyramids, away from the bright lights of Cairo. They are so common there that the desert-dwelling bedouins have a special word for them.⁴⁷

And now consider that the very word the Romans gave us for these wonders of the world, pyramid, consisting of the words pyra (‘fire’) and mid (‘middle’), thus ‘fire in the middle’.

The Egyptian word for pyramid is takhat, meaning simply ‘light’.