The research progress has been being great. We have excavated three more spots right on top of the megalithic site in the past couple of weeks, which give more evidence and details about the buried structures. We have uncovered lots more stone artifacts from the excavations. The existence of the pyramid-like structure beneath the megalithic site is now loud and clear; even for non-specialists, it is not too difficult to understand if they come and see for themselves. We have found some kind of open hall buried by soil five to seven meters thick; however we have not yet got into the main chamber. We are now drilling to the suspected location of the chamber (based on subsurface geophysic) in the middle of the megalithic site.51
It was only a few days after Danny sent me that mail that the Presidency changed hands and the drilling and excavations were stopped. Nonetheless, the first, short, interrupted season did produce important results. As Danny confirmed in his correspondence with me, even the relatively young layer that was all they had time to excavate—the second artificial columnar rock-layer beneath the megalithic site visible on the surface—yielded a radiocarbon date of 5200 BC (i.e. 7,200 years ago, nearly 3,000 years older than the orthodox dating for the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt) and there are firm indications from the original remote sensing and core drilling work of much older layers below.52 In short, it is now evident to all that Gunung Padang is vastly older than the 3,000 years that archaeologists had insisted upon for decades. Even the most hostile among them, therefore, have begun to reframe their assessment of the site and to refer to it as “a gigantic terraced tomb, which was part of the biggest megalithic culture in the archipelago.”53
I stayed in touch with Danny during the writing of this book. On 14 January 2015 he emailed me to tell me the disappointing news that further fieldwork had not yet been authorized. “We are still waiting for the new government to take action on the continuity of the national team for Gunung Padang,” he wrote. He was concerned, he added, about construction activities that had been undertaken at Gunung Padang in the interim “by Public Works, Tourism Department and others … They are conducted without a clear plan/design and consultation with us, so they are destroying the site.” He remained optimistic, however, that he and his team would be allowed to continue with their excavations shortly. If so, he said, “by the end of 2015 I hope to know more about the second layer (the 7,000-year-old constructions) and begin to understand about the third layer (pre-10,000 years ago).”54
On 10 March 2015, I heard from Danny again. Most unfortunately, he could only report that there had been no progress at all since his mail of 14 January:
The new Ministry of Culture has not activated the national team yet. We are still waiting and hoping the new Ministry will have a good attitude toward Gunung Padang research.55
Time will tell, but the auspices do not look good, and as Magicians of the Gods goes to press I fear that the dead hand of orthodox archaeology may once again have prevailed, in what almost appears to be a deliberate strategy to prevent us from learning the truth about our past. Below the layers dated to approximately 7,000 and 10,000 years ago are the even older strata of man-made constructions at Gunung Padang. These strata, as yet unexcavated, as yet unexplored, identified only by core-drilling and remote sensing equipment, go back before the cataclysmic episode of the Younger Dryas (12,800 years ago to 11,600 years ago) and deep into the last Ice Age, when the lost civilization still thrived—the lost civilization that we know only through myths and traditions, and through the works of its survivors as they sought to recreate “the former world of the gods.”
Indonesia must rank among the most plausible candidates anywhere on earth for the heartland in which that civilization could have evolved and grown to maturity. In recognition of this, a number of serious researchers, including Danny Natawidjaja and Professor Arysio Santos, have presented evidence that Plato has been misunderstood over the location of Atlantis in the Atlantic Ocean.56 All the clues, they say, really point east and place the lost civilization between the Indian and the Pacific Oceans—i.e. on the exact spot once occupied by the flooded Ice Age continent of Sundaland, of which the Indonesian islands are the surviving remnant. Mainstream archaeology remains strongly opposed to the notion of any lost civilization by any name, regardless of whether it is said to be located in the west or in the east. In my opinion, however, there’s already enough ancient “high strangeness” around Indonesia to raise question-marks over such thinking. A few examples:
• I’ve already mentioned Homo floresiensis, the “Hobbit,” quite possibly a completely different human species from our own57 that survived for tens of thousands of years after our other evolutionary cousins the Neanderthals and the Denisovans had vanished from the earth. It’s intriguing that the date of extinction of Homo floresiensis appears to have been around 12,000 years ago58—exactly in the apocalyptic Younger Dryas window.
• In its issue of 8 October 2014, the prestigious academic journal Nature reported, in a tone of astonishment, that elaborate, sophisticated cave paintings had been found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi with a minimum age of 39,900 years, making this art as old, or older, than anything comparable ever found in Europe—previously considered to be the exclusive home of such early, advanced symbolic behavior.59
• And it was Nature again, in its issue of 12 February 2015, that reported the discovery on Java of geometric engravings “generally interpreted as indicative of modern cognition and behavior” yet dated to half a million years ago—which is 300,000 years older than the supposed first appearance of anatomically modern humans on our planet.60
If evidence like this that rewrites the human story has remained undiscovered in Indonesia until so recently, how much else is still to be found and why shouldn’t the next turn of the archaeologists’ spade reveal a hitherto unrecognized civilization? Given the vast loss of terrain suffered across this entire region as a result of more than 100 meters of sea-level rise at the end of the Ice Age, anything is possible. This is why Gunung Padang is so important. And most important of all, perhaps, is that huge chamber identified by ground-penetrating radar and other remote sensing technologies lying deep within the pyramid between 70 and 90 feet beneath its apex.
Is it the Hall of Records of the lost civilization?
Once again, only time will tell …
Mountains of fire and ash
Gunung Padang wasn’t quite the end of our June 2014 research trip. After re-exploring that amazing site, absorbing its ancient, mellow, slightly perplexing atmosphere and understanding again, even more clearly than before, why it is still to this day known as the Mountain of Light by local people who love and revere it, Santha and I travel back to Bandung, the regional capital. From there the following morning we catch a train for the seven hour journey to Yogyakarta in Central Java, where we mean to spend a few days around the fabled Buddhist temple of Borobudur.
The train journey is … charming, and the endless vistas it affords of rice fields and mountains and green trees everywhere bursting with life, and the friendly, busy people, are a delight. It’s nightfall by the time we arrive in Yogyakarta, but the next morning we’re up at 4 a.m. to drive to Punthuk Setumbu, a hillside looking down into the valley where Borobudur stands. The air’s not cold—it’s never seriously cold here—but it’s fresh and there’s a wide pool of darkness beneath us … expectant darkness, because that’s where Borobudur is and will soon be lit up by the sun.
But the sun rises slowly, light seeping into the sky, gradually illuminating the thickly forested mountainside and the valley below, showing us the distant slopes of the towering twin volcanoes that also overlook Borobudur—Mount Merapi (literally “Fire Mountain”), which is still active, and Mount Merbabu (“Mountain of Ash”), which is dormant. By around 5 a.m. the dense trees that carpet the valley floor begin to become visible, though shrouded in low-lying cloud, and soon afterward a breath of wind stirs the mist, giving us our first glimpse of the massive, jagged pyramidal form of Borobodur, crowned
with a towering stupa that seems to reach for the heavens, a cosmic axis piercing the navel of the earth to connect sky and underworld. As the sun rises higher the mist swirls and expands, winding and curling among the trees, pooling in the deeper parts of the valley, but above it all Borobodur stands out clear, like some mythical island from the dawn of time.
We’re impatient to visit it after this tantalizing invitation, but we have another plan for today and drive east out of Yogyakarta heading first for Surakata City (usually referred to by its residents as Solo) and then onward further east to Mount Lawu, another massive, dormant volcano. The whole of Java, it seems, is straddled by these slumbering giants, whose outpourings in the past have blessed the island with essential nutrients, making its soils incredibly verdant, fertile and productive.
We wind our way up Lawu’s precipitous slopes through green glittering tea plantations until at an altitude of 910 meters (2,990 feet), with the peak of the volcano still towering more than 2,000 meters above us, we reach the little hamlet where Danny Natawidjaja has recommended we take a look at Candi Sukuh, a rather odd and mysterious little temple. “It seems out of place in Indonesia,” he told us. “It looks more like a Mayan step pyramid.”
This, it turns out, is absolutely correct. Sukuh, though smaller, is astonishingly similar in general appearance to the step-pyramid of Kukulkan/Quetzalcoatl at Chichen Itza in the Yucatan. Sukuh was built in the fifteenth century, just before the conversion of Indonesia from Hinduism and Buddhism to Islam. Why it was built, however, or why its style is so distinctive and unusual for Indonesia, remains a mystery to scholarship. The Kukulkan Pyramid, in its present incarnation—though it encloses an older structure—is thought to have been built between the ninth and twelfth centuries. Thousands of miles and hundreds of years therefore separate the two structures and the likelihood of any direct influence of one upon the other is slim. As I explore Sukuh, however—and it has a mystical air about it enhanced by a late afternoon mist that wreathes the whole mountainside—I find myself wondering whether the similarities are pure accident, or whether they might not be better explained by the influence in both regions of the same remotely ancient common source.
The signal
Certainly such an influence is present at Borobudur, a pyramid-temple consisting of 1.6 million blocks of volcanic andesite,61 constructed over a period of fifty years from the last quarter of the eighth to the first quarter of the ninth century AD.62 There is no dedication inscription, indeed almost no inscriptions of any kind. 63 This is, however, undoubtedly a Buddhist monument—a fact of which one could hardly be in any doubt since its acres of exquisitely beautiful reliefs are devoted for the most part to stories from the life of Buddha. Within Buddhist thought it is to be regarded as:
a cosmic mountain, a sacred replica of the universe designed to lead the pilgrim to the realization of full enlightenment, sambodhi, by which a Bodhisattva becomes a Buddha—the ultimate goal of Buddhism … The devotee follows a path to the top of this mountain, keeping his right shoulder to the monument. Subsequently his path brings him along the … many galleries that show panels with scenes in stone relief of which the Buddhist character has become clear and which have been recognized to represent the ancient Buddhist texts.64
On this clockwise perambulation of the monument, gradually working your way up from earth to sky, you pass 504 life-sized statues of the Buddha, of which 432 are found on the square stepped terraces with the remaining 72 on the three circular terraces at the summit surrounding the great central stupa. In addition, calculations of the correct pilgrim route through the four bas-relief galleries have shown that the direction of the path:
as well as the number of times that each gallery must be walked, is determined by the bas-reliefs on each side of the gallery walkway. In order to “read” the entire collection in the correct order, worshippers are compelled to complete a total of ten circuits around the galleries in the clockwise direction. In so doing, each worshipper passes by a Buddha image an additional 2,160 times before reaching the summit entranceway …65
The reader will realize immediately, as I did when I undertook my own perambulations of Borobudur, that with these numbers we are back once again in the mysteriously insistent and universal numerical code described in previous chapters. This code, as we’ve seen, is based on the hard to observe phenomenon of the precession of the equinoxes that unfolds at the rate of one degree every 72 years, that sees the equinoctial sun housed in turn by each constellation of the zodiac for 2,160 years and that is deployed to make the Great Pyramid of Giza a model of our planet on a scale of 1 to 43,200.
Its presence also at Baalbek, and at Göbekli Tepe, and now here at Borobudur, as well as in myths and traditions from all around the world, can only be explained by a remote common influence manifesting in all these places and forms—that “almost unbelievable” ancestor civilization identified by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, that “first dared to understand the world as created according to number, weight and measure.”66
It’s my intuition, as I’ve suggested at several points throughout this book, that the lost civilization sought to send a signal to the future—indeed to us, today, in the twenty-first century—and that the carrier wave of this signal is the precessional code.
Two different means were used to ensure the signal’s survival through time.
First, it was embedded in myths and legends and in mathematical and architectural precepts that would be passed on and renewed again and again by the different cultures that received them, thus boosting the signal and allowing it to remain intact for thousands of years. Even if those through whose hands and minds the signal passed no longer understood its meaning, the weight of sacred tradition, hoary with age, would ensure that they continued to transmit it and would do their utmost to keep it free from interference.
Secondly, the signal was hard-wired into certain megalithic sites. Some were hidden in plain view like the Giza complex, which successive cultures continued to work on and perfect for thousands of years according to the “divine” canon. Others were buried in the ground—time-capsules like Göbekli Tepe, and perhaps like that mysterious chamber deep beneath Gunung Padang—and primed for rediscovery when the time was right.
“There shall be memorials mighty of their handiworks upon the earth,” the Sacred Sermon of Hermes tells us, “leaving dim trace behind when cycles are renewed.”67
According to G. R. S. Mead, the pioneer scholar in the field of Gnostic and Hermetic Studies, these lines are meant to turn our attention back toward the past:
to a time when a mighty race, devoted to growth in wisdom, lived on earth and left great monuments of their wisdom in the work of their hands, dim traces of which were to be seen in the “renewal of the times” …68
Mead finds in this an echo of the ancient conviction “that there were alternate periods of destruction by fire and water, and of renewal”:69
In Egypt, the common belief … was that the last destruction had been by water and flood. Before this Flood … there had been a mighty race of Egyptians, the race of the first Hermes … Some dim traces of the mighty works of this bygone, wisdom loving civilization were still to be seen …70
And Mead adds, as few modern scholars would dare:
I am, myself, strongly inclined to believe this tradition; and I have sometimes speculated on the possibility of there being buried beneath one or more of the pyramids the remains of some prehistoric buildings that have survived the Flood.71
There is more in the Hermetica that touches on this theme, and quite specifically a reminder of the “Books of Thoth,” of their creation by Thoth-Hermes himself, and of their purpose:
For what he knew, he graved on stone; yet though he graved them onto stone he hid them mostly, keeping sure silence though in speech, that every younger generation of cosmic time might seek for them.72
Depositing his books, the wisdom god uttered the following words, admitting in the process his own “p
erishability”—and thus, perhaps, that he was no god but a mortal human being:
Ye Holy Books, which have been written by my perishable hands, but have been anointed with the drug of imperishability … remain ye unseen and undiscovered by all men who shall go to and fro on the plains of this land, until the time when Heaven, grown old, shall beget organisms worthy of you …73
Mead provides no explanation of this strange word “organisms”—sometimes also translated as “instruments”—but in his own edition of the Hermetica, Sir Walter Scott does. “After long ages,” he says, it means that “there will be born men that are worthy to read the books of Hermes.”74
Has that time come?
Are we worthy, at last, to read those “books” of lost wisdom hidden away before the Flood?
And, if so, what might they say?
Part VIII
Closure
Chapter 19
The Next Lost Civilization?
More than two thousand flood myths that have come down to us from the remote past are eerily consistent on many points, and on one in particular: the cataclysm was not a random accident, we are told; we brought it upon ourselves by our own behavior.
Our arrogance and our cruelty toward one another, our noise and strife and the wickedness of our hearts, angered the gods. We ceased to nurture spirit. We ceased to love and tend the earth and no longer regarded the universe with reverent awe and wonder. Dazzled by our own success, we forgot how to carry our prosperity with moderation.
So it was, Plato tells us, with the once generous and good citizens of Atlantis, who in former times possessed “a certain greatness of mind, and treated the vagaries of fortune and one another with wisdom and forbearance,” but who became swollen with overweening pride in their own achievements and fell into crass materialism, greed and violence:
To the perceptive eye the depth of their degeneration was clear enough, but to those whose judgment of true happiness is defective they seemed, in their pursuit of unbridled ambition and power, to be at the height of their fame and fortune.1