The Crucible of Mystery
By Wayne Saalman
[Photo by Amanda Kerr]
“IMAGINATION IS MORE IMPORTANT than knowledge,” Einstein is frequently quoted as saying and that, “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mystery.”
When one looks into the dawn of human history, one discovers just that: enormous mystery. One also discovers a colossal touchstone for the imagination.
Recorded history is one thing, of course, and the time prior to recorded history another.
The possibility exists that what separates recorded history from the unchronicled millenniums that preceded it is down to a world-wide apocalyptic deluge that wiped out, or significantly diminished, the civilizations that were already extant on the earth in those days.
While the current historical epoch places civilization’s roots in Sumer and a myriad of noteworthy cultures that followed on from Sumer, such as those found in Babylon, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Russia, India, China and so on, what is generally not accepted in orthodox circles is that any collective peoples who lived anywhere in the world prior to the rise of Sumer were anything other than primitive tribal groups or wandering nomads. Such primitives were said to be lucky if they could build any form of shelter for themselves, never mind edifices that could house governing hierarchies and structured public organizations for an entire society.
That is certainly what conventional archaeologists would have us believe. So, too, virtually every academic institute around the globe. Those who are not beholden to the “Establishment” for their funding and salaried positions, however, are free to openly dig much deeper into the cryptic archaeological record and follow the evidence wherever it happens to lead.
What has been postulated by researchers like Graham Hancock, Robert Bauval and Robert Schoch is that prior to the Great Deluge, believed to have occurred in or around 10,000 BCE, there were indeed some significantly advanced civilizations on the Earth. Maverick geologists and archaeologists point to the Great Pyramid as being much older than orthodoxy would have it. Schoch is especially famous for insisting that the rainwater erosion marks around the base of the Sphinx which could only have come about prior to the Sahara becoming a desert.
Researchers also point to the phenomenal temple, Nabta Playa, in Egypt as a pre-Sumer site that incorporates astounding astronomical knowledge in its layout and Baalbek in Lebanon with its mysterious Trilithon blocks, each of which weighs in excess of a thousand tons. Who had the technology or wherewithal to move blocks of stone that size?
More recently, there is Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, a temple complex which is indisputably at least 10,000 years of age.
South America, too, has sites of interest such as Machu Picchu, Puma Punku, the Kalasasaya Temple complex and the massive, phenomenal “jigsaw puzzle” walls in Sacsayhuaman. Again, who could lift blocks of stone of that size, cut them to perfection and place them in situ? How did they do that?
The amazing thing is that all of these ancient sites exhibit building skills that embody astronomical and mathematical knowledge that positively defies notions of the primitivism to which the Establishment forever relegates them. The fabled Golden Age, Establishment figures say, is pure fantasy. They say forget about the Sumerian clay tablets and all of the carved symbols, the hieroglyphics and the petroglyphs in stone around the globe that attempt to convey important explanatory knowledge about who built these places and why. Forget about the “tales” that have survived the ravages of time in one form or another. Such stories are pure myth. They are all balderdash.
In fairness, no one can say for sure that specific civilizations such as Atlantis, Lemuria or Mu actually existed prior to the Great Deluge, nor that any particular group such as the Anunnaki (the Nephilim or “Sons of God” written about in the first book of the Bible) existed for certain. The Anunnaki allegedly came here from the “heavens” according to the Sumerian Clay Tablets and directly gave rise to that culture.
As for Egyptian culture, it left a staggering legacy in hieroglyphics on their great stone temples. Those hieroglyphics speak of “gods” imparting knowledge to them, as well. Indian culture, too, offers a wealth of information about “gods” in their most sacred literature, the Vedas.
That humanity today still cannot replicate the phenomenal temples and pyramids that were built in those most ancient of days stands as proof to many of us that some kind of advanced civilization had to have existed prior to the founding of the cultures that appear in the historical record, but the Establishment dismisses this notion with a wave of the arrogant academic hand.
Nevertheless, there are researchers, such as those mentioned above, with exceptionally open minds and a passion for solving the great mysteries of this world. They bravely tell their alternative histories. What emerges is a surprising progression in the narrative. These researchers claim that the “gods” spoken about all around the globe were “advanced beings” of some nature whose technology was so far beyond the primitive tribal nomads who roamed about the Earth in those days that the native inhabitants could only regard them as god-like. After all, what did the natives know for themselves? They knew that survival was difficult, that nature could be catastrophic, that shelter was tenuous at best. They knew that food sources were sometimes scarce, that members of the tribe often fell sick, or worse, fell over dead and that there was nothing that could be done about that. Such was life.
All of that changed, though, when a mysterious race of Advanced Beings came on the scene and began working with the native inhabitants. Those Advanced Beings lived significantly longer lives than the primitive tribal peoples and thus, perhaps, the concept of the gods being “immortal” emerged. And, of course, the gods could construct edifices that took one’s breath away. They could build entire cities, in fact, and were said to have flying machines that could take them anywhere they wished to go, including into the heavens above.
Some of these “stories” are doubtless simply tall tales, but certainly not all of them. When stones weighing in excess of a thousand tons are quarried, lifted up out of a quarry and carried up a hill to be placed in clear astronomical alignment with the geometries of the Earth and the heavens above, there is no way that one may dismiss such evidence out of hand.
Theories abound, of course, and many try very hard to keep as down-to-earth as possible with their theories, which is prudent, but still there is a great deal of mystery about it all.
It’s great fun, nevertheless, to conjecture and speculate, and imagine scenarios that are not so down- to-earth or mundane. After all, where would we be today if Einstein hadn’t imagined himself riding a beam of light and streaking out across the universe like the greatest surfer of all time? What if the Wright Brothers or others like them hadn’t believed it possible for heavier-than-air objects to fly?
Our world is almost unfathomably rich in terms of the sheer mystery that underlies our cultural origins. To believe that the world is but a humdrum, mundane, profane affair is to rob the human imagination of all that is fantastic in my opinion.
What those structures tell is a mighty tall tale, indeed, but not one that is but “mere fiction” as the Establishment would have us believe. There is too much that is still unexplained by the orthodox, academic community. There are still too many possible alternative histories to consider, which is why there is great gain to be made by the more imaginative among us.
Immersing oneself in the crucible of mystery and stretching one’s horizons without apology is an indulgence, but one rooted in intellectual freedom and the right of the so-called “average, ordinary person” to speculate to his or her heart’s content. After all, great things can come of it.