One of Rand’s major aims, in trying to understand the hidden geometry of the Giza site, was to try to locate this secret chamber. The notion seems to have originated in a document called the Westcar Papyrus, now in the Berlin Museum, which seems to be a New Kingdom copy of a Fifth Dynasty original (soon after the time of Cheops, or Khufu). It tells how Cheops asked a magician named Djedi the number (or precise location) of Thoth’s secret chamber, and was told that it could be found in a flint chest in a building called the Inventory. But no one, Djedi added, would be able to obtain the number until the coming of three kings as yet unborn… The papyrus breaks off at this point.
In their book Keeper of Genesis, Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock make an interesting suggestion. Bauval regards the Giza pyramids as a reflection on the ground on the three stars of Orion’s Belt, and he and Hancock explain their belief that the secret chamber can be found reflected on the ground where the vernal point – the location in the heavens of the spring equinox – was located in 10,500 BC. This was under the rear paws of the constellation of Leo, and Bauval and Hancock go on to suggest that the chamber is therefore located under the rear paws of the Sphinx.
More recently, Nigel Appleby has proposed that the secret chamber will be found at a spot on the ground that is a reflection of the star Sirius, which embodies the goddess Isis. This location has proved to be on someone’s allotment on the outskirts of Cairo, and at the time of writing the theory has not yet been tested.
Rand, naturally, was inclined to approach this problem of Thoth’s holy chamber from the angle of his own Atlantis blueprint. All our researches have led us to believe that ancient Egypt preserved the legacy of an earlier civilisation, perhaps of more than one, and that contemporary science is inclinded to greatly underestimate the intelligence of the people of the remote past. It was, at least, plausible that there was a hidden cache of knowledge inside or around the Great Pyramid. The Byzantine historian George Syncellus in the ninth century A.D. wrote a commentary that included a reference to a lost Egyptian text called The Book of Sothis, which was circulating in the third century B.C. This lost book, according to Syncellus, contained important records brought to Egypt immediately after the flood.
Robert Bauval, in Secret Chamber, unearths another clue in a tract called the Kore Kosmou, from the famous Hermetic Writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistos (or Thoth), of which the most famous sentence is “As above, so below.” Scholars had inclined to dismiss these writings as Neoplatonist texts written by Greeks in the third century AD, but more recently it has been widely accepted that they date back to early Ptolemaic times in Egypt (i.e., from 323 B.C. onwards). In the Kore Kosmou, Isis tells her son Horus that the secret knowledge of Hermes was engraved on stone and hidden away near the secrets of Osiris. She also declares that a spell has been cast on these books, to ensure that they remain unseen. The fourth-century Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus also writes of “subterranean passages and winding retreats” built by men before the flood to house documents, “lest the memory of all their sacred ceremonies should be lost.”
Rand had read a children’s book on magic called The Secrets of Alkazar, and had never forgotten its advice to aspiring young magicians: pay attention to the techniques of misdirection:
“The audience will always look where the magician looks. The magician must never look at what he wants to conceal. The audience will treat as important what the magician treats as important, and as unimportant what the magician treats as unimportant.”
Rand reflected that a hidden chamber might well be concealed according to the methods of Alkazar.
In Keys to the Temple, David Furlong discovered that there is a phi relationship between the pyramids of Giza.
The most obvious things at Giza are the pyramids and the Sphinx, so someone who wished to conceal something would expect future generations to devote their attention to these. But supposing this is just misdirection?
Rand also recalled that one of the sacred names of the Sphinx is neb, which means the spiralling force of the universe. Why should a spiral be associated with the Sphinx? Is it possible that the spiral was a Fibonacci spiral?
In The Keys to the Temple, David Furlong had also pointed out that the golden section has been used in the layout of the three Giza pyramids.
Rand recalled that, in a book called The Giza Necropolis Decoded (1975), Rocky McCollum had noted that he could draw a Fibonacci spiral that would touch the apex of all three Giza pyramids. It folds in on itself, as can be seen, at a spot south-east of the pyramids, between the Sphinx and the Nile. It is Rand’s conviction that Thoth’s Holy Chamber lies at the centre of this spiral.*
*Rand notes that the southeast corner of the Great Pyramid is highlighted in Robert Temple’s The Crystal Sun. Temple has discovered that once a year, at sunset, during the winter solstice, the Middle Pyramid casts a Golden Triangle shadow upon the southeast corner of the Great Pyramid. Once again we find the geometric direction of the southeast. Is the shadow another way of pointing towards’s Thoth’s Holy Chamber?
In September 1980, engineers from the Egyptian Ministry of Irrigation had been measuring the depth of the water table under the Sphinx and set up their drilling equipment half a football field to the east of the Sphinx. They expected to have to penetrate about 20 feet and were puzzled when their drills went on through the sand until, at more then 50 feet, they hit something solid.
It proved to be red granite, of the same kind that can be found in the antechamber to the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid. Such granite is not to be found in the area of Giza; like the black granite that lines the King’s Chamber, it has to be brought from Aswan, 500 miles south. The implication would seem to be that there is some kind of underground chamber. The irrigation engineers also thought that the layout of the red granite suggested an ancient harbour.
In 1990, the geologist Thomas Dobecki, who accompanied John Anthony West and Robert Schoch to Giza to check the notion that the Sphinx might have been weathered by water, sent vibrations down into the rock under the Sphinx’s front paws and found evidence of a rectangular underground chamber. In October 1992 a French engineer named Jean Kerisel was in the descending passage that goes down to the underground chamber of the Great Pyramid, using ground penetrating radar. Beneath the horizontal passageway that connects the end of the descending passage to the underground chamber, Kerisel’s equipment detected a ’structure’ that could be a corridor crossing the horizontal passageway at an angle of about 45°. It seemed to lead directly to the Sphinx.
The historian Herodotus, as we have seen, had been told of underground chambers intended to be the tomb of Cheops, but this has generally been discounted as misinformation. That may be so. What does seem certain is that the Giza plateau is honeycombed with underground tunnels.
This was again demonstrated in 1977, when a team from Stanford Research Institute used a new technique called resistivity (which involves the passing of an electric current into rods driven into the rock) to investigate the Sphinx, and concluded that behind the northwest rear paws there was an anomaly that looked like a tunnel running northwest (the direction of the Great Pyramid) to southeast.
If the centre of Rocky McCollum’s Fibonacci spiral is, in fact, Thoth’s Holy Chamber, then presumably there is some connection with the Great Pyramid. Rand drew a line from this centre to the foundation stone of the Great Pyramid, and noted that it passed through the rear paws of the Sphinx, in the same direction as the Stanford researcher’s hypothetical tunnel.
At this point, he discovered something intrigued him. This line, continued in a straight direction, through the foundation stone in the northeast corner of the Great Pyramid, pointed directly at the Hudson Bay Pole, and another from the Sphinx to the fountain stone, they form an angle of 28°.
From Giza there is a 28° difference between the old and current pole. We have noted in earlier chapters the importance of this angle on the Giza plateau.
Rand comments:
This solution to the location of the Holy Chamber breaks Thoth’s magic spell by revealing that the pyramids and Sphinx are the most amazing case of misdirection ever conceived. It solves the mystery of the southeast to northwest directions that show up at Giza. This direction points at the former position of the North Pole when it was in Hudson Bay. The red granite in front of the Sphinx may prove to be part of a roof covering a secret subterranean structure designed to house treasures from a lost world. Only a civilisation equipped with the tools of astronomy, geometry, geodesics and a knowledge of the former location of the Earth’s crust would be able to find the treasure so carefully hidden in the desert sands. Thoth hid his treasure well.
Excerpt from The Atlantis Blueprint
pages 103–109 of Chapter Four: Thoth’s Holy Chamber
