Paranormal archeology
Very rare has been in the past the confirmed visions of the future. Most of them are usually linked to a wide range of related psychic phenomena such as mediums, people who are known to be reincarnations of historical figures ... and even ghostly apparitions that indicate where and how to dig.
This article presents a brief review of some of the most famous visions that punctuate the exciting history of archaeology.
Some time before Egypt was freed from British occupation in 1952, the British ambassador in Cairo, Lord Cromer, ordered the burning of a curious papyrus from the Ptolemaic period (304-30 B.C.). In it it was said that the ancient gods of the country of the Pharaohs had become angry with their people, and had decided to leave Egypt for an indeterminate time.
According to the document, some signs made this abandonment evident:
the ibises migrated from the banks of the Nile, while the lotus flower and the papyrus reed disappeared from their usual places. The gods, however, warned in that text something else: from their departure the country was to be ruled by foreigners until, once forgiven, it would see the lotus, the ibis and the papyrus reed return to where they should always have been. The course of history would prove this papyrus right.
Since 304 B.C., with the arrival of Alexander the Great in Egypt, the Nile has never ceased to be controlled by Greeks, Romans and settlers of all kinds. However, as prophesied, everything was about to change. It was shortly before 1952, according to an Egyptian scholar named Dorothy Eady who was then living in Cairo, that lotuses reappeared on the sacred river, ibises were seen gliding again south of Luxor and papyrus reeds flourished on the islands of the Nile.
The time of the return of the gods was about to be fulfilled. Coincidentally or not, this prophecy turned out to be quite accurate, and since 1952 all of Egypt returned to the hands of its rightful inhabitants.
Henceforth, the Egyptians would rule Egypt.
The Dorothy Eady Story
Dorothy Eady, the woman who proved the accuracy of this prophecy, was not just any woman. In addition to being a superb draughtswoman and assistant to remarkable archaeologists such as Selim Hassan or Ahmed Fakhry, their entire lives have been linked to "premonitions" as accurate as those of the ancient Egyptian gods.
Although perhaps they were not exactly premonitions, Eady believed she had lived a previous life in Egypt, as a priestess of Isis in the temple of Abydos, in the south of the country. According to her own account, Eady - then called Bentreshyt - had an illicit affair with Pharaoh Seti I, and became pregnant by him. Since the virgins in the service of the Temple could not have carnal relations with anyone, not even with the pharaoh himself, before putting her beloved monarch in serious trouble, Bentreshyt decided to take her own life. Since then -so Eady firmly believed- Pharaoh Seti had been looking for her in the Beyond, and finding her reincarnated in a little English girl of the end of the last century, she appeared to him on numerous occasions and informed him of all the details of her previous life.
In this curious way, "memories" of all kinds surfaced in Eady that seem accurate premonitions of later archaeological discoveries, especially at Abydos. When Dorothy-Bentreshyt arrived here with her strange story in 1956, the Abydos temple guards decided to put her to the test. During a nighttime visit to this Seti-erected precinct, they urged her to make her way in the dark to several of the site's rooms. Not only did she reach them with complete aplomb, but along the way she did not stumble over anything or once take a wrong turn. The guards had to accept that his knowledge of the site had not been acquired from his studies in Cairo, for at that time the temple was in very poor condition and no one had published plans or detailed descriptions of it. Needless to say, from those "tests" Dorothy Eady gained the respect of the custodians of the site.
Thanks to this woman, the restoration work undertaken at Abydos in 1956 under the supervision of Edouard B. Ghazouli progressed at a rapid pace. Dorothy - known in the area as Omm Seti, or "mother of Seti", for that was indeed the name of her only son - was at that time ahead of a spectacular discovery. Since she was a child she "knew" that in Abydos there had been a generous garden that had nothing to do with the rough desert of today. She knew even its smallest details and was sure of where it was located: southwest of the Temple. Well, soon Ghazouli's work confirmed Omm Seti's "visions" to the millimeter. "Since I arrived here," recalls Eady "I insisted on the existence of that garden, which was finally discovered in the exact place where I said it was. There were tree roots, vineyard roots, small canals for irrigation and a well, which still had water."
Today Omm Seti appears in all the books of Egyptology that speak of Abydos, as the "magician" who helped to unearth the most hidden secrets of the beautiful temple erected by the powerful pharaoh Seti I. Of her predictions remain, however, to be confirmed those that refer to the discovery of a subway chamber in Abydos where not only numerous treasures of the Temple will be found, but also fragments of papyrus containing substantial parts of the diary of Pharaoh Seti, written in his own handwriting.Given the accuracy of her visions, researchers like Stephan A. Schwartz have reflected on the case of Omm Seti concluding that, in reality, "what seems to happen is that some aspect of human consciousness has the ability to move in time and space". He adds, "Perhaps Omm Seti applied remote viewing faculties when he discovered the garden of the Temple of Seti at Abydos."
Dreams of eternity
Schwartz is one of the staunchest defenders of the so-called "psychic archaeology" and convinced that intuition and all forms of extrasensory perception, such as precognition, can be put at the service of archaeology. I met Schwartz briefly in Los Angeles in May 1991 at the headquarters of the Mobius Foundation, where he has been concentrating, since 1976, all his efforts to defend the use of clairvoyance in research on man's past. In the short history of "psychic archeology", one can find numerous accounts of dreams, clairvoyances and "announcements from beyond the grave" that predate important archaeological discoveries.
This is a variant of the phenomenon of premonitions that is alien to its main mechanism of operation. Namely: they are triggered on the eve of major historical events, catastrophes of tremendous scope or events involving a strong social upheaval, as the other articles in this monograph demonstrate. However, the "archaeological" variant of this phenomenon indicates that there is more behind the premonitions. Much more.
One of the characters of this century who carried his visions further than any other.
The man who was the "sleeping prophet", Edgar Cayce. This man, famous in the United States for his "readings" of his patients' past, claimed that five centuries before Columbus, Viking ships arrived in America, commanded by Eric the Red, and settled along present-day Minnesota. Well, nowadays almost no modern historian opposes this idea, which in the sixties -long after the time when Cayce made it public- was still defended against the current by characters such as Jacques de Mahieu, who even located stone representations of the famous Viking ships, the Drakkars, in states such as Minnesota or Massachusetts.
And we continue with Cayce, since this particular vision of the "sleeping prophet" was completed with many others that are still far from being confirmed. This man predicted, for example, that before 1998 a secret chamber would be discovered under the claws of the Sphinx of Gizéh, whose discovery would confirm the existence of a "mother culture" much earlier than the pharaonic one, located in the disappeared Atlantis. Although it is true that galleries have been discovered around the Sphinx - I myself entered last November in one that leads to the heart of the statue from the base of its tail-, there is still nothing to suggest that this "room of the archives", as Cayce called it, has been discovered. In spite of this prediction to be fulfilled, other affirmations of his like that the origins of Egypt go back to times in which hordes of Caucasian tribes invaded the delta of the Nile subduing the autochthonous black population, seem to be confirmed with the most recent excavations. Indeed, everything seems to indicate that pre-dynastic Egypt was made up of black-skinned men. Something that few believed in Cayce's time.
About Atlantis, Cayce assured in 1933 that it was a very advanced culture, with a technology based on the use of crystals, and that it had several colonies scattered throughout the Atlantic Ocean, being especially important that of Bimini. Following his usual defiant prophetic style, he even dared to predict that in 1968 "under the mud accumulated for so many centuries in the sea, near what they call Bimini" someone would find the remains of what was once an Atlantean temple. Well, in September 1968, an American diver working for the Miami Science Museum named Manson Valantine discovered, only 150 kilometers off the coast of Florida, what appeared to be a wall 580 meters long and 10 meters wide. An "impossible" wall carved by an unknown civilization. An construction that looked like a kind of gigantic retaining wall and that, thousands of years ago, must have even given its name to the island itself. Bimini, in the Taino language, means "island of the old wall".
And old it must have been, since the organic samples obtained from the joints of its blocks gave an approximate age of ten to twelve thousand years. That is, exactly the age Plato attributed to the mythical Atlantean civilization in his dialogues Timaeus and Critias. But there is more: that same year of 1968 another American diver, Ray Brown, with a solid reputation as a treasure hunter, discovered something else between the islands of Andros and Bimini. A kind of city in ruins, drawn around what looked like the remains of a pyramid, and which must have been designed by a civilization that the chronicles of the Caribbean do not speak of. Brown never shared his finding with anyone, but he claimed until his death that he himself saw a huge carved crystal being held by a statue from which only its metallic hands emerged. One of the Atlantean crystals to which Cayce also referred? Brown took the answer to his grave.
The etheric brotherhood of Glastonbury
The origins of modern psychic archaeology must necessarily be sought in Britain at the beginning of the century. It was in 1907 when a man called to unearth some of its mysteries arrived at the ruins of the emblematic Glastonbury Abbey - so deeply rooted in the Arthurian myths - Frederick Bligh Bond. Imbued with the Anglo-Saxon spirit of the time, Bligh decided to get the help of a sensitive to know where to start his excavations in that sea of ruins.
The psychic in question was Captain John Bartlett, a skilled practitioner of automatic writing who soon believed himself to be in contact with a certain Friar William, who helped him draw plans and layouts of Glastonbury with no apparent connection to the ruins. The truth is that both Bligh and Captain Barlett began to notice something very curious: as this Fray Guillermo psychographically transmitted plans of Glastonbury, the excavations of Bligh's team of laborers confirmed his indications.
In fact, Friar Guillermo announced the discovery of the remains of an unknown chapel to the east of the temple. He dictated its proportions and
He even revealed to them that its builder was a certain Abbot Beere, who baptized it with the name of King Edgar's Chapel. It was not until 1909 - when the data of these psychic communications had already been erased from the memory of Bligh and Bartlett - that the archaeologists' shovels confirmed the veracity of such assertions. Even the measurements proved to be completely accurate. The doubt of the parapsychologists is: announcement from the Beyond or "simple" premonition of the two characters involved?
Bligh and Bartlett never asked themselves such a question. Concealing from the Church of England the reason for their archaeological successes, the two remained in contact with Friar William and an increasingly assorted "team" of monks who referred to themselves in psychographic messages as the "Company of Avalon" or the "Watchers of the Other Side". Be that as it may, several documents, including a letter from one Everard Feilding, confirm that Friar William's announcements occurred many months before the archaeological discoveries, and even before Bligh was appointed to be in charge of the excavations at Glastonbury.
Quite a premonition... even from the Beyond.
MORE DETAILS AT
- Jonathan Cott, The Reincarnation of Omm Seti. Javier Vergara Editor, Madrid, 1992.
- Jeffrey Goodman, Psychic Archaeology. Martínez-Roca, Barcelona, 1981.
- Stephan A. Schwartz, The secret vaults of time. Grosset & Dunlap, New York, 1978.
