"And take upon's the mystery of things,
As if we were God's spies..."
William Shakespeare
King Lear 5:3:17-18
New reviews including The Way of Awen by Kevan Manwaring and The Dark Man by Deborah Wells ... see Books page
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The Koornwinder Convention team and speakers
Lore and order: learning from the ancients
The Koornwinder Convention, Amsterdam, June 22, 2010
Ancient Wisdom and 21st Century ICT: Decoding the Hidden Structure of the Universe
Every time I drive to and from Bristol International Airport from my home in Somerset, I pass the Stanton Drew stone circles, three impressive rings by the River Chew which are older than the Pyramids, Stonehenge or Avebury.
The time-worn but venerable megaliths in the fields across the river stand in silent testimony to the arcane and ancient science of their builders who may well have been the pioneers of henge-building in prehistoric Britain.
Thus, setting out at the 2010 summer solstice for the international Koornwinder Convention in Amsterdam (and returning from it a few days later), the question of the valuable recovery of this lost science in the present day, and the prospect of an ancient lore to learn and live by, was renewing itself with an optimistic vigour.
For Herma Koornwinder’s prestigious event in the Dutch capital was a meeting of minds inspired by that knowledge and wisdom of the ancient world which is subtly reasserting itself today through the work of many dedicated researchers, authors and conference and other media, particularly in the fields of astro-archaeology and prehistoric geometry and measure. It is just as if the times require it, as if the world now needs to look to its distant past to navigate the way into its uncertain future.
The Koornwinder Convention, however, was unique in its origins which lay, remarkably, in the realm of stock market analysis where Herma (pictured right)through the use of information and communication technologies (ICT), had identified forces and patterns in the movements of share prices which she later found reflected in her dowsing of earth energies at sacred sites around the world. These energies and patterns, she discovered, are evidence of a hidden structure or order to the universe founded on number, geometry and proportion, a self-organising principle of creation which helped her to predict accurately and consistently the rises and falls of stock markets over a ten-year period in the 1980s and 1990s.
At the convention, Herma called for fundamental change in the banking and investment industries, asserting that the 21st-century methods for analysing trends in stock markets would, for example, help to restore the losses in pension funds suffered in the financial crises of recent years, and lead to much better risk management of assets.
In a dramatic illustration, Herma showed a series of graphs revealing how individual stock markets around the world fell cascade-like during the six months prior to September 2001, suddenly plummeting on the 10th - the day before the attacks on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and on the Pentagon (see picture below). ‘Share prices are the result of human behaviour and their behaviour creates patterns that show up in graphs,’ she said. ‘It was as if the markets knew!’
Of course, when the idea of the ancient wisdom meets modern sensibilities, there will be incredulity before acceptance among many, but Herma’s crucial cross-disciplinary work will help to raise consciousness and, hopefully, free this inevitable cultural log-jam. As a result of her conference, new energies have been brought to the quest, new connections and correspondences have been revealed, and there will be new avenues of research to explore for all involved.
The event was the first major move in Herma’s mission to bridge the academic and the spiritual spheres - and the importance of her friendship with the Egyptian Sufi healer Mahmoud Eissa, co-producer of her film documentaries, emerged strongly from the proceedings. Here was a key confluence of Western rationalism and Eastern mysticism, of the intellectual and the intuitive, and the harmonising of the domains of the left and right brain.
And moving assuredly behind the conference was the spirit of the Ancient Egyptian goddess Seshat, the deity of communication, of knowledge and wisdom, writing and learning, mathematics and measurement, history and astronomy, all essential aspects of the Koornwinder Convention.
I see Herma’s project as involving an attempt to unite scientific thinking and alternative traditions to suggest the possibility of a much wider and more radical science emerging from the two areas; indeed, to suggest that we might have had such a science, working to a completely different set of principles, available to us for thousands of years, but which were made inaccessible to us by historical events.
The common ground of all the convention speakers, as Mahmoud Eissa indicated at the outset, was how contemporary research was recovering the ancient wisdom at an increasing pace, how it was now being received both academically and spiritually. ‘When I met Herma, she projected the academic side,’ he said, ‘When she asks questions, I can give many answers from my inner knowing. We have to work hard together to receive more of these gifts from God.’
Ahmed Mahmoud, scholar and tour guide, spoke of his own new research into the symbolism of Seshat whose divine arts may well have included dowsing to establish the most auspicious locations and layouts for the temples of Ancient Egypt. ‘When Herma first told me about dowsing, I didn’t believe in it,’ said Ahmed. However, after seeing Herma dowsing in the Tutankhamun exhibition at the Cairo Museum he realised, following a year of research on the subject, that the goddess Seshat could have been connected with dowsing, ‘possibly described by a different name and using different methods or tools’.
Philosophy in the ancient sense of the term
World mysteries investigator Bert Janssen, who acted as master of ceremonies as well as being a speaker at the conference, sounded the keynote of the occasion with his view that the event was responding to a need to see ‘the big picture’ - what I would interpret, in this context, as a re-creation of philosophy in the ancient sense of the term, that way of stepping back from the ‘close-up’ everyday position and finding a noumenal pattern in the structures of our universe.
Christopher Knight and Alan Butler, co-authors of Before the Pyramids: Cracking Archaeology’s Greatest Mystery, revealed how ancient knowledge - specifically, in this instance, comprising the measure and geometry used at prehistoric sites in Britain and at the Giza Pyramids - was embodied in the layout of Washington DC when the capital city was founded 200 years ago, and how it has continued to be deployed there down to the present day, under the guardianship of freemasonry.
Robert Bauval and Thomas Brophy, whose collaborative book Black Genesis will be published in March 2011, explained how the origins of pharaonic civilization lay with a black African prehistoric people in the Egyptian Sahara whose geometrically arranged stone circles at Nabta Playa must be, at 7,000BC, among the world’s earliest examples of astronomically aligned monuments. One complex seems to be a map of the Milky Way galaxy, another, a map of the Andromeda galaxy, and yet another, a star-viewing platform.
Leaning towards the occult, Hermetic and Gnostic traditions in attempting to uncover hidden links and threads within the living universe, to which sacred geometry, art and writings point throughout human history, I spoke of how the significance of the ubiquitous spiral form and pattern in nature was recognised in prehistory. The spiral is evidence of a universal organising principle or force at work behind the scenes of our ‘normal’ day-to-day perceptions; for me, crucially, it represents the trajectory of consciousness, the shape of time and the pattern of spiritual growth.
In her closing address to the conference, Herma announced that there would be a further five documentary films to introduce other authors and researchers in the field of ancient knowledge to a broader audience and to combat scepticism in the wider world. There was a need for specialists to work together and learn from one another. Her reading and research over the past ten years had brought her to a higher level of understanding about the way the universe worked.
She described how her use of ICT for stock market analysis, and dowsing rods for the detection of leys and ‘points of power’ at ancient sites and in Washington DC, had revealed a common energy in number sequences and the same patterns and lines of force - whether in share prices or at stone circles, crop circles, pyramids, tombs, temples, monasteries or mosques. Dowsing had been used by ancient cultures and was part of a special system of worldwide knowledge which embraced the use of energy lines and points of power.
‘People from all over the world should unite and bring together their shapes and forms in geometry to create a universal database,’ she said. ‘The scientific community could play a fundamental and invaluable role in establishing scientific proof of our findings by re-introducing new aspects and approaches into science - with the help of ancient knowledge and wisdom.
‘Ancient wise men knew about the system of number and measure and weight in the universe. I strongly pledge to re-introduce this knowledge in our daily lives towards more respect for nature and more sustainability, in an approach to life both on a personal and political level.
‘Let us do away with the old systems and the old investment models. They have had their time and must be superseded in the light of all the disasters that we have been experiencing in the recent past, without an end in sight. Our economic and financial systems must become more reliable and work for everyone rather than only for the very few who are able to speculate on the movements of the market. Let's pay heed to everyone's interest.
‘Interference with worldwide eco-systems for the sake of economic interests the world over must be thoroughly reconsidered if we want to provide a livelihood for our children.’
ABOUT HERMA KOORNWINDER
She found that worldwide patterns determined price developments and, as a consequence, the global economy, when the financial world at large assumed that price developments occurred randomly.*
As well as Black Monday, Herma anticipated correctly the rise of international share prices in 1988, the drop preceding the 1990 Gulf crisis, the recovery of prices in January 1991, and the 1993 rise in prices and the stock market correction in 1994. The success of her methods between 1989 and 1994 was verified by an independent accountancy firm, Deloitte & Touche.**
In 2008, there was another important happening. This was Herma’s first encounter with the strange ‘earth energies’ associated with the art of dowsing - a skill she never knew she had until she visited England that summer. A chance meeting with the Dutch crop circles investigator Janet Ossebaard led Herma to visit Wiltshire to see these mysterious formations for herself and, while there, she was given a pair of dowsing rods to try out.
During her eight years as a professional analyst at the Dutch stock exchange, from 1989-1997, Herma Koornwinder was proved right in 90 per cent of her assessments of global stock markets. In her research in the field, she had questioned many accepted ‘truths’ and, through her exploration of knowledge technology, had seen a complex network of relations between the different parts of the world financial market as a whole.
She found that worldwide patterns determined price developments and, as a consequence, the global economy, when the financial world at large assumed that price developments occurred randomly.*As well as Black Monday, Herma anticipated correctly the rise of international share prices in 1988, the drop preceding the 1990 Gulf crisis, the recovery of prices in January 1991, and the 1993 rise in prices and the stock market correction in 1994. The success of her methods between 1989 and 1994 was verified by an independent accountancy firm, Deloitte & Touche.**
In July 1995, Herma presented an extract from the Deloitte & Touche report, with its positive evaluation of her investment advice, to the chairman of the Dutch Stock Exchange, Baron van Ittersum.Her predictive strategies were developed under the aegis of her consultancy, Koornwinder Global Market Navigation (KGMN), which she launched in 1990 to promote her vision while she worked as an advisor for retirement funds of companies such as Shell and Brenca, and insurance company Zwitserleven. KGMN was one of the first ventures in the area of investment innovation on the electronic highway.
In 2000, Herma began to undertake personal research. ‘Through the shapes and patterns that determine the behaviour of financial markets, I discovered an underlying order of universal magnitude for which I had no logical explanation,’ she said.
‘The impact of this finding was so great that I felt the need for further study of this phenomenon. I studied comparative religion, different cultures, philosophy, psychology, ancient science, and so on, and I read many hundreds of books on these subjects. It felt like an exciting discovery tour.’
‘The impact of this finding was so great that I felt the need for further study of this phenomenon. I studied comparative religion, different cultures, philosophy, psychology, ancient science, and so on, and I read many hundreds of books on these subjects. It felt like an exciting discovery tour.’
In 2008, there was another important happening. This was Herma’s first encounter with the strange ‘earth energies’ associated with the art of dowsing - a skill she never knew she had until she visited England that summer. A chance meeting with the Dutch crop circles investigator Janet Ossebaard led Herma to visit Wiltshire to see these mysterious formations for herself and, while there, she was given a pair of dowsing rods to try out. She said: ‘Despite my initial reluctance, I tried out the rods and was flabbergasted when I recognized that the movement of the rods was the same as I had noticed in my work with lines in number sequences which gave the spark for my search for an underlying system of order. And who could have expected me to find it in the crop circles? I felt the same force in crop circles that I had noticed in the sequences of numbers.’
Herma now believes that the system of earth energies, and the ‘points of power’, or energy centres, which they generate in the landscape, points the way toward ‘a more natural and responsible resourcefulness that will allow us to live in natural, ecological and economic harmony on this planet. It offers an alternative source for energy supplies, derived from points of power, and an alternative approach to stock market analysis and architecture’.
Herma is living proof that, no matter how old you are, life can become an exhilarating journey of discovery, not only of the world but of oneself. How she turned from being a high-flying global market analyst into a passionate advocate of ancient science and philosophy, as well as a ground-breaking film-maker with an urgent message for the world, is an extraordinary story.* The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired. Stephen Hawking
** Out of 23 trend predictions of various stock markets delivered by KGMN over the period 1989 to 1994, 22 were confirmed by later events. Out of seven equity portfolios composed by KGMN, six performed better than the corresponding stock market index; one scored equal. On average, the KGMN portfolios outperformed, in absolute terms, the stock market index by ten per cent. A number of KGMN's more descriptional predictions and forecasts are described in various publications and client reports. These were, with rare exception, all confirmed by the course of events that followed.
THE LOST SCIENCE SERIES – WHAT IT’S ABOUT
Herma’s unique film project comprises five documentaries each with a runtime of about 40 minutes. They have been made with a go-ahead Egyptian production team, the core of which comprises co-producer Mahmoud Eissa, directors Mostafa Youseff and Khaled El Fares, cameraman Mohamed Abdul Raouf, and tour guides Ahmed Mahmoud and Refaat Abdelwahab.
Film 1 - Earth Energies and Points of Power
Location: Egypt, April/May 2009
Location: Egypt, April/May 2009
Herma and Mahmoud Eissa introduce the ‘earth energies’ theme of the series. Herma explains her dowsing technique, tells the surprising tale of how she came to be a practitioner of the art, and speaks of some of her findings in Egypt. Walking with her pair of copper rods, she dowses leys and ‘power points’ of energy which she discovered determined the layout of ancient monuments at Luxor, the Valley of the Kings and at Karnak – her rods spin furiously above centres of energy. Herma also dowses for earth energies at Sakkara, the Bahariya Oasis, the Temple of Niuserre at Abu Ghurab, and at the Great Pyramid at Giza.
Film 2 - Crop Circles, Stock Markets and Megaliths
Location: England, July 2009
Herma introduces her discovery that geometrical figures, and symbols and patterns from the art and ceremony of ancient civilisations, some often seen in crop circles, also appear in the graphs which she produced, as a global market analyst, showing the movements of stock prices. In Wiltshire, the world ‘hotspot’ for crop circles, Herma examines scientific research into the strange phenomenon, and interviews key investigators Michael Glickman, Charles Mallett and Bert Janssen. As well as crop circles, where energy lines and points set her rods spinning again, Herma visits the famous prehistoric monuments of Stonehenge, Avebury and Silbury Hill.
Film 3 - Stones, Spirals and the Hidden OrderLocation: Egypt, October/November 2009
Herma ponders the possibility of a ‘world grid’ and how its geometrical and geomantic properties could relate to a universal order reflected in the ancients’ positioning and design of temples and pyramids, and in the behaviour of financial markets. She interviews Geoff Ward about his study of the spiral form and pattern in nature and human culture – itself evidence of a universal unifying and organising principle. The crew visit Abu Simbel, the Bahariya Oasis, Nabta Playa in southern Egypt where megaliths are among the earliest known archaeo-astronomical constructions, and enter the King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid.
Film 4 - Sacred Geometry and Washington DC
Location: USA, March 2010
Herma introduces the theme that the architect Pierre Charles L’Enfant, appointed by George Washington in 1791 to design the layout of the US capital, worked to a system of ‘sacred geometry’, as used in the planning of cities in the ancient world. With her dowsing rods, Herma traces these patterns - symbolically potent and related to cosmic energies - at major city landmarks, detecting the same principles in play as at ancient sites and in crop circles. She interviews Robert Bauval, Christopher Knight and Alan Butler about the fascinating links between Washington DC and freemasonry as the repository of this ancient knowledge.
Film 5 – Alexandria and the Ancient Wisdom
Location: Egypt, March/April 2010
Continuing her mission to locate the energy lines that ancient civilizations used in their city planning and architecture, Herma witnesses a miracle of dowsing at Hellenic Alexandria. Her rods work not only over land but also as Mahmoud dives to the 2,000-year-old ruins of Cleopatra’s palace and temple complex and Pharos city, one of the world’s richest underwater archaeological sites. Robert Bauval explains how the ancient wisdom, including astronomical alignment of structures, integrated humankind with the cosmos. Herma also visits old Islamic Cairo, which was carefully planned on leys by the architect Jawhar Sakkaly (The Sicilian).
Number rules the universe. Pythagoras
First formations to crop up in 2010 season
This crop circle near Stonehenge in Wiltshire was reported on May 9, in the field where the famous "Julia Set" spiral formation appeared in 1996.
See the Crop Circles and My Book pages for the significance of spiral curves in crop circle patterns.
The crop circle shown below right was reported on May 4 at Old Sarum, near Salisbury, Wiltshire, and measured about 180 feet in diameter.
The crop circle shown below right was reported on May 4 at Old Sarum, near Salisbury, Wiltshire, and measured about 180 feet in diameter.
This was the first formation to appear in 2010 and may have been in the field of late-blooming oil seed rape for a couple of days before May 4, with quite a number of people already having visited it, leaving substantial damage behind them.
The formation is easily visible from the ancient hill camp of Old Sarum close by. There have been only two crop circles in this locality in the last 18 years.
The formation is easily visible from the ancient hill camp of Old Sarum close by. There have been only two crop circles in this locality in the last 18 years. The third formation shown here, lower right, was reported on May 22 at Wilton Windmill, near Wilton, Wiltshire, measuring 290 feet in diameter, with the outer ring 14 feet wide.
The fourth crop circle, lower left, was reported overlooking Silbury Hill, Wiltshire, on May 31, the first formation in barley this year, and measuring 180 feet across. For the significance of Silbury Hill, see the Prehistoric Geometry page.
►Thanks for the photos to Silent Circle whose crop circle information centre re-opens on June 15, 2010, at the village hall at Yatesbury, Wiltshire, just off the main A4 main road a couple of miles west of Avebury.
This is an ideal location in the heart of UK crop circle country.
The new venue will have a permanent marquee for refreshments 
and meetings and the usual shop selling books, photos, maps, DVDs, craftworks related to crop circles and the surrounding sacred landscape, and much more.
Silent Circle will be open six days a week, Monday to Saturday, from 9.30am to 6pm. Turn off the A4 to Yatesbury, sharp right at Hangar 45, and then look for small roadside signs to guide you the rest of the way.
and meetings and the usual shop selling books, photos, maps, DVDs, craftworks related to crop circles and the surrounding sacred landscape, and much more.Silent Circle will be open six days a week, Monday to Saturday, from 9.30am to 6pm. Turn off the A4 to Yatesbury, sharp right at Hangar 45, and then look for small roadside signs to guide you the rest of the way.
'Clock' was invented by Stone Age Brits
Stone Age people invented a form of clock that enabled them to tell the time of day, the seasons and even latitude, an author claims in remarkable new research.
And development of the device led to the mysterious Silbury Hill in Wiltshire becoming the prototype for pyramids in Egypt and around the world and also the basis of the English system of measures, says Peter Watts, a retired electrical engineer from Stogursey, Somerset.
After 15 years of study, Peter (pictured) has concluded that Stone Age people were maths wizards thousands of years before the Ancient Greeks who are thought to have been the pioneers in geometry and trigonometry.
Peter’s theory is that a simple model, developed at Stonehenge and based on a 3:4:5ft right-angled triangle and a vertical pole to cast the sun’s shadow, calibrated at the spring or autumn equinox, enabled latitude to be determined in terms of angle and pole height, as well as the time of day and year, anywhere on Earth. This was millennia before the Chinese and Egyptians developed the gnomon for the sundial – the upright that casts the shadow.
Peter said that the latitude location and the shape of 5,000-year-old Silbury Hill was a “mathematical statement” of the how the ancient “clock” worked. “Silbury Hill is perhaps the most important archaeological site in Britain,” he said. “There is so much information built into its shape, size, dimensions and location.”
Amazingly, Peter has found that the latitudes of important ancient sites around the world, including the Great Pyramid of Giza and others in the Middle East and Central America, correspond to various exact pole heights in inches, suggesting that the knowledge of the model was exported by its British inventors and experimented with by different cultures.
Peter believes that standard measures were first developed at Stonehenge. By observing the transit of any star round a segment of any circle, such as the 56 Aubrey Holes, and counting on a string and stone pendulum, its length would determine standard measures, including the English foot. The dimensions and locations of the stone circles at Avebury and Stanton Drew, near Bristol, appeared to be statements of what the ancient Brits had found up to then, he said.
The Priddy circles in Somerset appear to be a megalithic signpost pointing to “missing archaeological links” at Brean and Weston-super-Mare, he says, the nearest long level beaches to the major megalithic sites of the West Country. Using a 5ft nominal eye height along these beaches would result in an observed 14,400ft nominal horizon. Inserting these values in a simple derived earth radius formula would result in a calculated 20,736,000ft nominal earth radius. At these beaches, the horizon distances to the island of Steepholm could therefore be determined.
Peter has actually checked that the sun behind Steepholm at midsummer day sunset casts a moving shadow along Brean beach enabling time to be measured easily down to one second, using the standard lengths and pendulum one-second beats initially developed at Stonehenge - in effect, a giant clock.
“The ancient Brits could have moved northwards to Weston-super-Mare beach to repeat the experiments for an extended period around midsummer day sunset,” he said. “ It is surely no coincidence that to sight Steepholm at horizon distance from Weston-super-Mare beach requires a pole equal to one English rod/pole/perch of 16.5ft.”
Silbury Hill, Peter says, was the result of experiments with pendulums and poles on these beaches and at various prehistoric Wessex sites, where other quantities such as the ratio pi and its value were determined. These measures, including the value of simple square roots, were then embedded in the dimensions of Silbury Hill and went on to form the basis of all English measures, including the foot and, significantly, the rod, pole and perch.
Peter’s theories build to an integrated system, involving Stonehenge, Stanton Drew, Avebury, Priddy, Silbury, Woodhenge and Prescelly, Wales, from where, it is claimed, the bluestones of Stonehenge were brought.
“It’s increasingly evident that mathematics evolved far earlier than commonly accepted,” said Peter, who has just completed a book in CD Rom form, Stone Henges, Pyramids and Earth Radius, which explains his theories in detail. “In times before the invention of writing, the few people who understood, perhaps astronomer-priests, would be forced to lay down their understanding of the principles of mathematics in the form of stone circles, pyramids, myths and legends, primitive calendars and so on, in the hope that they would be decoded by future generations.
“We in the 21st century do the same sort of thing when burying time capsules under buildings or include important coded information about our civilization in spacecraft.”►Here’s how the Stone Age clock works (see diagram). A vertical pole is placed in a corner of a right-angled triangular grid with sides measuring 3ft, 4ft and 5ft (shown in red). In the diagram it is 4pm as one-sixth of a circle around the pole represents four hours – a full circle represents 24 hours. The tip of the shadow of the pole marks one month before the March 21 equinox when the “clock” is calibrated. The pole angle (top left) gives the latitude of the location by means of the pole’s height – 22in at Silbury, for example, 44in at Babylon, and 88in at Palenque, Mexico.
►You can get in touch with Peter Watts, and obtain a copy of his book, through Mysterious Planet by using the Contact page.
►You can get in touch with Peter Watts, and obtain a copy of his book, through Mysterious Planet by using the Contact page.
Your guide to the gateways of the gods
Especially and exclusively for Mysterious Planet, George Mitrovic (pictured), from Australia, has written an introduction to his monumental but as yet unpublished work, The Gateways of the Gods. It is one of the most astonishing things you are ever likely to read about ourselves, our planet, our solar system and the universe, and I am delighted to be able to create a new page for it on my website (see menu, left). Last summer, George sent me his manuscript, running to a staggering 1.25 million words, containing the fruits of many years’ research, and I knew right away that here was something quite out of the ordinary and which I must help to publicise.
George, an antiques dealer by profession who lives in New South Wales, told me: “I would like to give you the opportunity to be the first person, other than a Pasteur prizewinning scientist who did the mathematical research based on my data and hypothesis, to examine what is the most amazing discovery in modern history: the ability to predict where and when wormholes open so as to access them to journey through the multiverse. It is not as complex as it appears. Imagine - travel to the stars bypassing time and space in the process!
“The discovery that I have made will be one of the most controversial and far-reaching in importance yet, especially in regard to our planet and its present position in time and space. There may be more to 2012 than at first popularly broadcast!”
George’s work – the “Mitrovic Principle” - also offers an explanation of worldwide anomalous phenomena including UFOs, crop circles, earth energy "power points", mystery animals such as Bigfoot and lake monsters, and freak weather conditions. An amazing feature of The Gateways of the Gods is George’s exhaustive listing of all known anomalous events around the world from 1800-1977 and his discovery that they followed regular cycles similar to the periodicities of the planets – “like being in harmony with the music of the spheres”.
See The Gateways of the Gods page.
►Do you have a family history or another important story that needs to be written, could you do with sound advice on creative writing, do you have a manuscript or webpages that need editing or proofreading, or need help with English studies including essays, coursework and exams? Author and journalist Geoff Ward has a Masters degree and a BA (Hons) degree in English, a teaching qualification, and many years of valuable experience in the UK media. He’d be happy to help you at reasonable rates. You can
get in touch with Geoff through the Contact page of this website.
The pyramid and the pendulum
More convincing evidence that our ancient ancestors were much cleverer than mainstream science will admit - and of their intriguing legacy in today’s world - comes in a new book, Before the Pyramids, from Christopher Knight and Alan Butler, co-authors of Civilisation One and other related titles. They set out to show that a thousand years after the great henges of Britain were constructed, the culture that planned and built them sent its knowledge overseas to “lay down the footprint” of the Great Pyramid and its companions.
The claim made by Chris and Alan, pictured right and below respectively, is that the plan for the pyramids was laid down at Thornborough in North Yorkshire, and that the henge array, dating from about 3,500BC, was known and perhaps revered across much of the planet.
The pair found that the layout of the Thornborough henges was a “perfect copy” of the pattern of the three bright stars of Orion’s Belt, as is said to be that of the Giza pyramids, too. They agree with Professor Alexander Thom (1894-1985) that the dimensions of Stone Age monuments were based on the “megalithic yard“, and say that this measure, which Prof Thom discovered, was arrived at from the beats of a pendulum, turning time into distance during observation of the planet Venus - the book gives a full explanation of how this would have been achieved.
The ingenious pendulum method was then later exported from Britain to Egypt to lay out the pyramids.
See Books page.
Time to put truth on the agenda
Andy Thomas, pictured, one of the world's leading authors and speakers on unexplained mysteries and global cover-ups, ponders some possible answers in The Truth Agenda, a profoundly disturbing but ultimately uplifting handbook for these turbulent times of millennial psychic change when, as the poet says, "the naked truth is still taboo whenever it can be seen".
In the book, a glossy, eye-catching production with scores of topical colour illustrations and a comprehensive appendix of online resources, Andy starts by using the mysteries of the Pyramids and crop circles as examples of how independent research is sidelined or ridiculed by the establishment, and goes on to consider three key events where the official stories simply don't stand up to scrutiny:
* 9/11 - was it masterminded by US intelligence agencies?
* the Moon landings - were they all done in NASA film studios?
* weapons of mass destruction - Iraq and the David Kelly affair. Was he murdered?
See Books page.
Hoax or treasure - when will we know?
An international controversy is flaring over the refusal to date Crete's famous - some say infamous - Phaistos Disk to prove once and for all whether it is a priceless treasure of the ancient world dating to at least 1,700BC, or a clever hoax from the early years of the last century.
My investigations (August/September, 2009) reveal that the latest plea to solve the mystery, by carrying out a special scientific test on the disk (pictured), has been turned down in Greece on grounds that it is a national treasure and "untouchable". Professor Ioannis Liritzis, of the University of the Aegean, Rhodes, applied for a permit for a thermoluminescence test - the only kind that can date the disk exactly - but the Greek Ministry of Culture's conservation directorate refused because the test would involve drilling into what they regard as a unique artefact.
The baked clay disk, measuring only six inches in diameter, kept at the Heraklion Archaeological Museum in Crete, has a spiral of strange hieroglyphs on each side which have baffled scholars for a century and have never been satisfactorily deciphered.
The baked clay disk, measuring only six inches in diameter, kept at the Heraklion Archaeological Museum in Crete, has a spiral of strange hieroglyphs on each side which have baffled scholars for a century and have never been satisfactorily deciphered.
A twist has been given to the dispute by the mysterious disappearance of a petition calling for a test which was to be sent to the Ministry of Culture after last autumn's International Conference on the Phaistos Disk in London. In an informal vote among the 40 scholars who attended, a majority favoured the disk's authenticity.
The disk was discovered by the Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier in July 1908 during excavations at the site of the Palace of Phaistos in Crete (pictured below). He dated it to about 1,700BC.
Wealthy New York art collector Dr Jerome Eisenberg, an expert on ancient forgeries, is convinced that Pernier forged the disk because he was jealous of the successes of fellow archaeologists, the Italian Federico Halbherr and the Englishman Sir Arthur Evans, at other excavations in Crete.
Dr Eisenberg, who himself applied for a thermoluminscence test in 2007 and was turned down, believes Pernier decided to outdo his rivals with a discovery that would astonish the archaeological community - a relic with an untranslatable pictographic text. "He had found nothing at Phaistos that could surpass or even equal the amazing finds at Knossos by Evans, begun in 1900," said Dr Eisenberg.
Asked about the petition, Dr Eisenberg said: "It mysteriously disappeared following the end of the conference. Perhaps one of the participants in favour of its authenticity absconded with it! I would indeed like to see a good petition find its way to the Greek government, but it would probably have to be launched by a sufficiently important organization to have any effect upon them." Dr Athanasia Kanta, the director of the Heraklion Museum, said: "The reply to the Liritzis application was negative because, apart from its uniqueness, the disk is complete and the policy is not to test complete artefacts with destructive methods. However, with the progress of science, I am certain that, before long, there will be non-destructive processes.
"I have no doubt that the disk is authentic. We must not forget that it was found during excavations by a very eminent scholar. For us a hundred years later to accuse him of fraud without evidence which would stand in a court of law is inconceivable and very unfair. How would you like it if, when you are dead and cannot answer back, somebody comes and says you are a felon or a thief?"
Signs within the script on the disk were known from other artefacts whose authenticity was not disputed, Dr Kanta added.
Edmund Marriage, one of the delegates at last year's conference, who believes the disk is authentic, said: "Some of us felt that if there was a strong undercurrent that the disk was a fake, there was no way the Greeks would want to date it. They have the most to lose on the claims that the disk is a forgery. However, the clear conclusion of the conference,with only three people believing it was a forgery, should have been put to the Greek authorities to encourage them and give them confidence to go ahead with dating."
Another British delegate, Bill Considine, said: "The suggestions that it might be a forgery seem at least partly engendered by 100 years of failure to 'read' it. It was pointed out at the conference that, since there is the possibility that the disk might be a forgery, it is unlikely to be tested. If it was, the Heraklion Museum would risk losing one of its prize exhibits. It's a much better attraction as the enigma that it has become. Even an accepted rational explanation of its use would take away some of the mystery."
Prof Liritzis said he understood the reservations for refusing a permit for sampling for a thermoluminescence test "because it might trigger similar doubts about other significant masterpieces of art, and this may not have an end".
See also Ancient Civilisations page.
See also Ancient Civilisations page.
The chill factor: How we've been duped
over climate change
This is the most important book in the world right now. I can't imagine one that could be more so. Chill: A reassessment of global warming theory (Clairview, £14.99) by the ecological scientist Peter Taylor (pictured), will open your eyes to the truth about the Earth's climate, which is cooling, not warming.
Global warming and climate change are inventions of science, not its discoveries. Climate change has become merely a slogan, ostensibly meaningful, but in true scientific terms, quite vacuous.Man-made global warming is a fabrication, an illusion brought about by flawed science. It has become a pervasive belief because it works very well for many powerful people. It is not a conspiracy, but more a mass delusion coupled to a massive collusion of interests.
Meticulously argued in a pellucid and persuasive prose that carries the reader forward in rapt anticipation, Peter's book (not financed by any organisation) is a devastating critique of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and must be the first critical survey of the science and politics behind the issue to be made by a committed environmentalist. For this, he cannot be congratulated enough.
The IPCC claims a consensus of the world's experts, but Peter proves this consensus is false and, in fact, never existed. There is only one basic piece of work to underpin the physics of carbon dioxide's ability to heat the atmosphere, and that is merely an assumption made by one member of the original small group of scientists that made global warming an international issue as long ago as 1988. Right from the start, that assumption was challenged as unsound, but dissent was marginalised. Politics had invaded science on a grand scale.
Future projections of global warming are critically flawed because they rely on a virtual reality computer model of the global environment that fails to incorporate long and short-term natural cycles. Peter says he was motivated to review the science because "the proposed cure is likely to be worse than the disease", and was deeply shocked to find that the predictive models had such a flimsy base.
The planet is now cooling, and so all the efforts to control carbon emissions are pointless and will make no difference to the situation. Instead, the billions being wasted in this direction should be spent on making ourselves resilient to the effects of global cooling which will cause food shortages just when food stocks are low and the population is increasing - another billion in the next 15 years. We could be facing a significant period of cooling comparable in severity to the "Little Ice Age" of 1400-1700.
Peter says: "We are not ready for global cooling. Our eye has been distracted by the virtual reality of computer simulation and an almost religious zeal to create a low-carbon economy. Food and health will be the real issues of the next decade, coupled with rising fuel prices and a crippled economy. This means that instead of ploughing vast sums into ineffective and very expensive barrages and turbine arrays, we need to be rebuilding our communities, refurbishing housing, establishing resilient local food supplies and making all our support systems robust to the future." Ample evidence for the operation of natural factors in the satellite record and in oceanographical data was available to the IPCC but it chose to downplay them. Late 20th century "global warming" was mainly due to a decrease in cloud cover and increased solar heating of the upper oceans, a phase which changed in 2001, since when there has been increased cloud - reflecting the sun's heat back into space - and no additional warming of the oceans. Already, summer ice in the Arctic is recovering.
Another factor in the cooling is the current "quiet sun" and the absence of sunspots, which has confounded NASA predictions. A large body of peer-reviewed evidence links ocean temperatures with the sun's magnetic cycle.
The general thrust of Peter's thesis is now shared by many scientists worldwide - thousands disagree with the IPCC view. One petition in the USA already has more than 30,000 signatures from scientists who object to the IPCC's approach. But can the runaway global warming bandwagon be stopped? Governments and top scientists will want to save face, which is at best inhumane and at worst a form of abject cowardice.
Thankfully, at street level, polls show very few believe the scary climate story. In the US, Canada and the UK, most do not trust the science, the campaigners or their governments, believing it's all a scam (which it is). A small, if deluded cabal has used its position and all manner of collusion to foster what Peter calls "this colossal erroneous child of our times".