The Sign and the Seal. A quest for the Lost Ark of the Covenant

I found that the theme of salvation from water also ran very strongly through the pages of the Old Testament. The prophet Jonah, for instance, was thrown into the sea during a raging tempest, swallowed alive by a giant fish and three days later 'vomited out upon dry land' so that he could preach the word of God to the citizens of Nineveh and divert them from their evil ways.(41) Even more familiar was the much more ancient story of Noah, who together with all his family and with 'two of every sort of living thing'(42) rode out the primeval deluge in a remarkable survival ship which we know as the ark ('make it with reeds and line it with pitch inside and out'(43). After the flood waters had receded, Noah's three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, heard God's command to 'be fruitful and multiply' and went out to repopulate the world.(44) By far the most famous and influential biblical figure to be 'saved from water', however, was Jesus Christ himself the only individual, other than Moses, to be described in the Scriptures as 'mighty in deed and word'(45) (a phrase which, as I already knew, implied proficiency in the utterance of magical words of power). Rather than being an actual rescue, the incident in question was wholly symbolic and took the form of the mysterious rite of baptism in the waters of the river Jordan. This, Jesus explained, was absolutely necessary for salvation: 'Except a man be born of water . . . he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.'(46)

And it came to pass in those days, that Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, and was baptized of John in Jordan. And straightway coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens opened, and the Spirit like a dove descending upon him. And there came a voice from heaven saying, Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.(47)

Though I knew that the vast majority of practising Christians took this passage from the Gospel of Saint Mark entirely at face value I could not help but wonder whether a deeper layer of meaning might not have been encoded in the stirring and beautiful words. It seemed to me at least possible that what was really being described here was the initiation of Jesus into the enlightened knowledge of a secret cult whose founders were literally 'saved from water' thousands of years earlier. Furthermore, I thought it not accidental that it was only after this initiation that Christ began to work his miracles most of which (including healing the sick, restoring the dead to life, multiplying loaves and fishes, and controlling the elements) would have been instantly recognizable to the High Priests and sorcerers of ancient Egypt as 'magic tricks' of the type that they, too, had been trained to perform.(48) After considering all the data that I had compiled I made the following entry in my notebook:

The theme of the civilizer, or founding father, or great prophet, or legislator, or Messiah who has in one way or another been 'saved from water' occurs in the Scriptures, and in Egyptian and Middle Eastern mythology, so frequently and with such consistency that it cannot be a matter of pure chance. I am not proposing that all the individuals concerned were actual survivors of that 'hypothetical and as yet undiscovered area', that supposed technologically advanced society which may have been the cradle for the civilizations of both Mesopotamia and Egypt. The fact is that only Noah, Osiris and perhaps Horns belong to a period of pre-history sufficiently remote to qualify them for that distinction. Sargon, Moses, Jonah, and Jesus, however (together with many other important figures in different places and at different periods), were all also saved from water either literally or symbolically. It therefore seems to me that what is really implied by this recurrent image is initiation of the individuals concerned into a tradition of secret wisdom started a very long time ago by the survivors of a flood in an effort to preserve vital knowledge and skills that might otherwise have quickly been forgotten.

Going beyond what could be deduced from myths and legends, I also found some rather more tangible evidence in Egypt to support the 'saved from water theory'. I knew that this evidence the concealment of complete ocean-going boats beside almost all the most important tombs of pharaohs and notables, and also near all the pyramids had thus far been treated by archaeologists according to the hoary old dictum that 'if you can't understand a particular custom then the safest thing to do is to put it down to religion'. It gradually dawned on me, however, that the practice of boat burial could well have been motivated by something other than a simple desire to install near the grave a 'physical representation of the symbolic craft that would take the soul or spirit of the dead king to its ultimate destination in the sky.'(49) A prime case in point was the cedarwood ship discovered buried and dismantled in a pit beside the southern edge of the Great Pyramid at Giza and now reassembled in a special museum on site. Still in perfect condition 4,500 years after it was built, I learnt that this giant vessel was more than 142 feet long and had a displacement of around 40 tons. Its design was particularly interesting, incorporating (in the informed opinion of Thor Heyerdahl) 'all the sea-going ship's characteristic properties, with prow and stern soaring upward, higher than in a Viking ship, to ride out the breakers and high seas, not to contend with the little ripples of the Nile.'(50) Another expert felt that the careful and clever construction of this strange pyramid boat would have made it 'a far more seaworthy craft than anything available to Columbus'; indeed, it would probably have had no difficulty in sailing round the world!(51) Since the ancient Egyptians were highly skilled at making scale models and representations of all manner of things for symbolic purposes(52) it seemed to me implausible that they would have gone to such trouble to manufacture and then bury a boat as sophisticated as this one if their only purpose had been to betoken the spiritual vessel that would carry off the soul of the king to heaven. That could have been achieved just as effectively with a much smaller craft. Besides, I learnt that recent research at Giza had revealed the existence of another huge boat, also on the south side of the pyramid, still sealed in its pit and there were also known to be three (now empty) rock-hewn pits on the eastern side. As one otherwise orthodox Egyptologist rather daringly admitted, 'it is difficult to see why so many boat pits should have been thought necessary.' Predictably he then fell back on the great standby of all puzzled scholars and declared: 'it is clear that their presence was required for some religious purpose relating to the afterlife of the king.'(53) It was precisely this point, however, which was not clear to me at all particularly since, as noted in the previous chapter, there was absolutely no indication that any pharaoh was ever interred within the Great Pyramid. Furthermore, the earliest funerary boats to be discovered in Egypt dated back to that mysterious period, just before the inception of the First Dynasty, when civilization and technology in the Nile Valley underwent a sudden and inexplicable transformation.(54) I therefore found it difficult to resist the conclusion that the curious practice of boat burial was more likely to be linked to the well established tradition of 'salvation from water' than to any purely religious symbolism. Sturdy ocean-going vessels, I reasoned, would have been of immense importance to a group of foreigners who had survived a flood and who had settled in Egypt after sailing away from the site of the cataclysm. Perhaps they, or those who came after them, had believed that the buried boats might one day be needed not to enable reincarnated souls to navigate the heavens like celestial pleasure trippers but, instead, to allow living individuals to escape once again from the scourge of some terrible deluge.

HIDDEN RICHES OF SECRET PLACES

The really great achievements of ancient Egypt all took place early. The peak period spanned the Third to the Fifth Dynasties roughly from 2900 BC to 2300 BC. Thereafter, albeit gradually and with some notable resurgences, the general trend was steadily downhill(55) This scenario accepted by all scholars was, I felt, completely consistent with the theory that civilization was brought into the Nile Valley during the fourth millennium BC from some technologically advanced but as yet unidentified area. After all, one would not have expected an imported culture to produce its most perfect forms of expression from the very moment that the settlers arrived; there would undoubtedly have been a great leap forward at that time but the full potential would not have been realized until the native inhabitants had picked up and learned the new techniques. And this was precisely what seemed to have happened in Egypt. Just before the beginning of the First Dynasty (say around 3400 Bc), writing, arithmetic, medicine, astronomy and a complex religion all appeared very suddenly without, as already noted, any local evidence of prior evolution in any of these spheres. At the same time highly sophisticated monuments and tombs were being built that incorporated advanced architectural concepts again with no trace of evolution. The First and Second Dynasties (say from 3300 BC onwards) saw the construction of ever more elaborate monuments which embodied with increasing confidence and vigour the new-found skills and knowledge that had arrived in Egypt.(56) And this trend towards greater and greater beauty and excellence received what many modern scholars regarded as its ultimate expression in the remarkable stone edifices of the funerary complex of King Zoser, the first Pharaoh of the Third Dynasty. The complex, which I visited several times in 1989 and 1990, is dominated by a towering six-tiered pyramid 197 feet high and is located to the south of the city of Cairo at Saqqara. The complete site takes the form of a rectangle nearly 2,000 feet long and 1,000 feet wide and was originally enclosed by a single massive stone wall, large sections of which are still standing. Other features include an extensive colonnade with forty tall columns, an elegant courtyard, and numerous shrines, temples and outbuildings all on a colossal scale but with clean and delicate lines. I was able to establish that in Egyptian tradition the conception and design of the entire Zoser complex had been regarded as the work of a single creative genius Imhotep the Builder, whose other titles were Sage, Sorcerer, Architect, High Priest, Astronomer and Doctor.(57) I became interested in this legendary figure because of the great emphasis put by subsequent generations on his scientific and magical abilities; indeed, like Osiris, his achievements in these fields were so highly regarded that he was eventually deified. With uniquely impressive engineering feats such as the Zoser pyramid to his credit, Imhotep looked to me like an obvious candidate for membership of the cult of Thoth: the monuments at Saqqara seemed eloquently to confirm that he had assimilated and then put brilliantly into practice the technological dexterity peculiar to that cult. I was therefore excited to discover that Imhotep was often characterized in inscriptions as 'the image and likeness of Thoth'(58) and also as the 'successor to Thoth' after the deity had ascended to heaven.(59) I then learnt something of even greater significance: in antiquity, Moses too was frequently compared to Thoth (indeed, in the second century BC an entire work was filled with such comparisons by the Judaeo-Greek philosopher Artapanus, who credited the prophet with a range of remarkable and clearly 'scientific' inventions).(60) The fact that individuals as far apart in history as Moses and Imhotep should have been explicitly linked through the cult of the moon-god struck me as strong circumstantial evidence not only for the existence of a secret wisdom tradition but also for the durability of that tradition. Accordingly I began to wonder whether there had been other magicians and sages like Imhotep to whom the design of particularly sophisticated and advanced buildings had been attributed. Unfortunately, no record survived of the architect who built the Great Pyramid at Giza. This remarkable edifice was certainly the crowning achievement of the splendid Fourth Dynasty during which Egyptian civilization reached its zenith. As one authority put it:

The Pharaohs would never again build to such scale and perfection. And this level of expertise carried over into almost every other form of art or craft. Under the Fourth Dynasty the furniture was the most elegant, the linen the finest, the statuary at once the most powerful and the most perfect . . . Certain skills, such as the making of inlaid eyes, reached levels that border on the supernatural. Later dynasties could produce but mediocre versions and ultimately the knowledge disappeared entirely.(61)

I could only agree with most of the above remarks. It seemed to me, however, that the very special technological skills required for the erection of splendid and imposing monuments had been preserved for a considerable period before 'disappearing entirely'. Though not given any practical expression, for example, there was no doubt that these skills had somehow survived the many centuries of cultural stagnation that set in after the Fourth Dynasty and had then reasserted themselves in the remarkable resurgence that occurred during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties (1580-1200 BC). The crowning achievement of this latter era, which filled me with awe every time I set eyes on it, was the beautiful obelisk of Queen Hatshepsut at Karnak. Nearby, on the western side of the Nile, the same monarch had also commissioned a massive mortuary temple that had later come to be regarded as one of the great architectural masterpieces of the world.(62) I learnt that the name of the long-dead architect responsible for both of these monuments had been Senmut. Intriguingly, an inscription that he himself had composed and that could still be read on his tomb wall left little doubt that his special knowledge and abilities had been acquired after he had been admitted to the mysteries of an ancient and secret wisdom tradition. 'Having penetrated all the writings of the Divine Prophets,' he boasted, 'I was ignorant of nothing that has happened since the beginning of time.'(63)

Suppose [I wrote in my notebook] that Moses (who lived barely 200 years after Senmut) was also an initiate in this same secret tradition a tradition that stretched back beyond the horizon of history through Imhotep to the god-kings Thoth and Osiris, and that extended forward as well to include other great scientists and civilizers like Jesus Christ. If there is anything at all to this hypothesis then is it not possible that some of the truly extraordinary thinkers of more recent years may also have been heirs to the 'occult' knowledge that inspired the builders of the pyramids and obelisks, and that made it possible for Moses to perform his miracles?

In seeking to answer this question, I was drawn back first and foremost to the Knights Templar who had occupied the original site of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem in AD 1119 and who, I believed, had learned something in the Holy City that had subsequently caused them to seek the Ark of the Covenant in Ethiopia. As reported in Chapter 5, the research that I had carried out into the beliefs and behaviour of this strange group of warrior monks had convinced me that they had tapped into some exceedingly ancient wisdom tradition and that the knowledge they had thus acquired had been put to use in the construction of churches and castles that were architecturally far in advance of other buildings of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Was it not possible, I now asked myself; that the wisdom tradition into which the Templars had been initiated had been the very one to which Moses, Senmut and Imhotep had belonged? And if so then was it not also possible that the knights' quest for the Ark had been connected to this tradition? I knew that it would probably prove impossible to substantiate such esoteric guesswork. Nevertheless, I was excited to discover a number of ancient Jewish traditions which asserted that the Ark had contained 'the root of all knowledge'.(64) In addition, as the reader will recall, the golden lid of the sacred relic had been surmounted by two figures of cherubim. Could it therefore have been pure coincidence that, in Judaic lore, 'the distinctive gift of the cherubim was knowledge'?(65) These were by no means the only tantalizing hints which suggested to me that the quest for the Ark might also have been a quest for wisdom. Equally significant was the fact that when the Templars were persecuted, tortured and put on trial in the early fourteenth century many of them confessed to worshipping a mysterious bearded head, the name of which was given as Baphomet.(66) Several authorities, pointing to the close connections that the knights had cultivated with Islamic mystics, had identified Baphomet with Muhammad(67) thus blithely ignoring the fact that Islam could hardly have inspired such behaviour (since Muslims, as I was very well aware, regarded their prophet as human not divine and had an absolute abhorrence of any kind of idol worship). A far more convincing explanation, however, was given by Dr Hugh Schonfield, an expert on early Christianity, who had deciphered a secret code used in a number of the famous 'Dead Sea Scrolls' a code that the Templars might easily have learned during their long residence in the Holy Land. Dr Schonfield showed that if the name Baphomet were written in this code and then transliterated the result would be the Greek word Sophia.(68) And the Greek word Sophia, in its turn, meant nothing more nor less than Wisdom'.(69) By this analysis, therefore, when the Templars worshipped Baphomet what they were really doing was worshipping the principle of Wisdom. And that, of course, was exactly what the ancient Egyptians had done when they had worshipped Thoth as 'the personification of the mind of God',(70) as 'the author of every work on every branch of knowledge, both human and divine',(71) and as 'the inventor of astronomy and astrology, the science of numbers and mathematics, geometry and land surveying, medicine and botany'.(72) I was encouraged to look further. One fact which quite quickly came to light was that the Freemasons had also held Thoth in special regard. Indeed, according to a very old Masonic tradition, Thoth 'had played a major part in preserving knowledge of the mason craft and transmitting it to mankind after the flood'.(73) And the author of a well researched academic study on the origins of Freemasonry went so far as to say that, in their early days, the Masons had regarded Thoth as their patron.(74) I was already aware (see Chapter 7) that close links had existed between the Templars and the Freemasons, with the latter almost certainly being descended from the former. Now I could see that what I was coming to think of as the 'Thoth connection' set those links in the ancient and enduring context of a wisdom tradition stretching back to Pharaonic times. I therefore asked myself this: in addition to the Templars and the Masons had there been any other groups or individuals whose works and ideas had appeared unusually advanced and who might possibly have been initiates in the same wisdom tradition? I found that there had been many. For example, Copernicus, the Renaissance astronomer whose theory of a heliocentric universe had overturned the earth-centred complacency of the Middle Ages, had said quite openly that he had arrived at his revolutionary insights by studying the secret writings of the ancient Egyptians, including the hidden works of Thoth himself.(75) Likewise the seventeenth-century mathematician Kepler (who, amongst other things, compiled an imaginary account of a trip to the moon) admitted that in formulating his laws of the planetary orbits he was merely 'stealing the golden vessels of the Egyptians'. (76) In a similar vein, Sir Isaac Newton had stated his view that 'the Egyptians concealed mysteries that were above the capacity of the common herd under the veil of religious rites and hieroglyphic symbols.'" Amongst these mysteries, he believed, was the knowledge that the earth orbited the sun and not vice-versa: 'It was the most ancient opinion that the planets revolved about the sun, that the earth, as one of the planets, described an annual course about the sun, while by a diurnal motion it turned on its axis, and that the sun remained at rest'(78) Newton's profound intellect and scholarship had enabled him to lay the foundations of physics as a modern discipline. His specific achievements had included epoch-making discoveries in mechanics, optics, astronomy and mathematics (the binomial theorem and the differential and integral calculus), huge steps forward in the understanding of the nature of light, and above all else the formulation of the universal law of gravitation which had altered forever mankind's vision of the cosmos. What was much less well known about the great English scientist, however, was the fact that he had spent a significant part of his adult life deeply immersed in hermetic and alchemical literature (more than a tenth of his personal library had been taken up with alchemical treatises).(79) Furthermore he had been obsessed literally obsessed with the notion that a secret wisdom lay concealed within the pages of the Scriptures: Daniel of the Old Testament and John of the New particularly attracted him because 'the language of the prophetic writings was symbolic and hieroglyphical and their comprehension required a radically different method of interpretation.'(80) It seemed to me, as I researched Newton further, that pursuit of this method perhaps explained why he had involved himself in an exacting study of some twenty different versions of the book of Revelation. He had learned Hebrew in order to do the job properly(81) and had then carried out a similarly meticulous exercise on the book of Ezekiel.(82) I was also able to establish that he had drawn on the information contained in this latter work to produce a painstaking reconstruction of the floorplan of the Temple of Solomon. Why? Because he had been convinced that the great edifice built to house the Ark of the Covenant had been a kind of cryptogram of the universe; if he could decipher this cryptogram, he had believed, then he would know the mind of God.(83) Newton's Temple floorplan had been preserved in the Babson College Library.(84) Meanwhile the seventeenth-century scientist had expressed his other 'theological' findings and observations in private writings that had totalled well over a million words.(85) In the mid-twentieth century these rather surprising manuscripts came to light and were purchased at auction by John Maynard Keynes. 'Newton was not the first of the age of reason,' the obviously shaken economist later told the Royal Society, 'he was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than ten thousand years ago.' Keynes made an extremely careful study of the manuscripts and concluded significantly in my view that Newton saw the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence, certain mystic clues which God had hid about the world to allow a sort of philosopher's treasure hunt to the esoteric brotherhood. He believed that these clues were to be found partly in the evidence of the heavens and in the constitution of elements, but also partly in certain papers and traditions handed down by the brethren in an unbroken chain back to the original cryptic revelation.(86)

Indeed so! And although I knew that I might never be able to prove that the 'brethren' in question had been directly linked to the occult traditions of the moon-god Thoth and to those scientists and civilizers who had been 'saved from water' I felt that there was at least sufficient evidence to confirm one intriguing fact In making his greatest discoveries, Newton had indicated several times that he had drawn not only upon his own genius but also upon some very old and secret repository of wisdom. He had once stated quite explicitly, for instance, that the law of gravitation expounded in his Principia was not new but rather had been known and fully understood in ancient times; he had arrived at it by decoding the sacred literature of past ages.(87) On another occasion he had described Thoth as a believer in the Copernican system.(88) Before that he had aligned himself with the German physician and alchemist Michael Maier (1568-1622) who had argued that, throughout history, all the true adepts of science had derived their knowledge from the Egyptian moon-god.(89) Amongst many other curiosities, I discovered that Newton had been struck by the fact that 'there was a general tradition of deluge amongst ancient peoples'(90) and had shown considerable interest in the biblical view that Noah was the common ancestor of all humanity.(91) Moreover, despite his own devoutly held religious convictions, he seemed at times to have seen Christ as an especially gifted man and as an interpreter of God's master-plan, rather than as the Son of God.(92) What I found most fascinating of all, however, was that the really pivotal figure in Newton's theology, and in his conception of early science, had been none other than the prophet Moses, whom he had regarded as an adept in the mysteries of the universe, a master of alchemy, and a witness to the double revelation of God (as expressed in His word and in His works).93 Long centuries before our own enlightened era, Newton had believed, Moses understood that matter consisted of atoms, and that these atoms were hard, solid and immutable: 'gravity accrued to both atoms and to the bodies they composed; gravity was proportional to the quantity of matter in every body.'(94) Newton had also regarded the account of creation presented in Genesis and attributed to Moses as an allegorical description of an alchemical process: