Seed of Knowledge, Stone of Plenty
Understanding the Lost Technology of the Ancient Megalith-Builders
Chapter 3: How Did they Know
Chapter 4: Return to the Lost World
by John Burke & Kaj Halberg
Book Sourced from: https://kajhalberg.dk/en/books/seed-of-knowledge-stone-of-plenty/
Table of Contents:
Find the full book in PDF HERE
Chapter 3: How Did They Know?
The short answer is: They felt it.
In fact, the average person is often capable of detecting such minor magnetic differences – under the right conditions. A small percentage of people seem to be ultra-sensitive to magnetism and can locate anomalies more or less anytime. This is true for modern people, who live surrounded by the constant distraction of permanent magnetic anomalies in the steel beams of our buildings and cars, and who sleep and move in artificial electric fields.
All of these elements must make us less sensitive than people who lived largely outdoors, without such desensitizing distractions. Yet, even we can feel electromagnetic changes at times. And shamans can almost always feel them. In this chapter, we will show you examples of this affect, still occurring today.
Let us start with ourselves, regular people. In 1985, Indian scientists decided to measure just how much household electric fields might be affecting our minds and bodies.2 They placed human volunteers, as well as rats, flat on their backs and passed a ring over their bodies, simulating the 110-volt alternating current fields in our homes, which oscillate 55-60 times per second. They measured blood pressure, pulse, brain waves, neurotransmitter levels in the blood, and also asked for comments from the humans. To their disappointment, they found no changes.
Now they decided to lower the rate of oscillation and see if that would produce physiological changes. It didn’t, until they got all the way down to 0.01 oscillations per second. That is one oscillation per one hundred seconds! Then they saw fireworks.
Three aspects of particular interest for our thesis are:
1) Oscillations of one per one hundred seconds are what frequently occur in the wee hours of the morning, when we get an occasional ‘twang’ of the magnetic field lines from disruptions in our planet’s magnetosphere many miles above.
2) Oscillations of one per one hundred seconds are not what we call Alternating Current (AC), but are really more of a disturbance in Direct Current (DC). And DC is what is found in nature, not AC.
3) The strength of the magnetic field produced was 50 gammas, or 50 nT (nanoteslas), equivalent to the strength of the earth’s natural daily perturbations, only a fraction of the 300-500 gamma anomalies that we found at some mounds. (A gamma is a unit of magnetic field strength.)
Essentially, the human volunteers were far more susceptible to effects mimicking natural magnetic fields than they were to magnetic fields similar to those in their homes. Just what effects? Well, that depended on which way they were facing.
When their heads were pointing east, the rats failed to react but humans reported a blissful reverie. With heads facing south or west, neither rat nor man reacted at all. But when heads were facing north and the staff triggered the magnetic fluctuations, everyone got very unhappy very fast. Humans reported anxiety, distress, panic, even nausea. The rats, who of course couldn’t talk, finally weighed in on the self-reporting scale and began to scream. Both species showed disruptions in every vital sign being monitored. And these sensitivities were found with average people, of no particular sensitivity.
The same strength in magnetic fluctuations (50 gammas) has also been found to increase sudden unexpected death in epileptic rats. Such deaths among human epileptics peak during the wee hours of the morning, just as do the pre-dawn fluctuations in the geomagnetic field.3
However, a broader definition of dowsing would include the ability to sense with the body a number of physical forces. Dowsers have long been the subject of admiration or disdain, depending on who you are talking to. Occasional scientific studies have pronounced that the performance of the subjects averaged no significant difference from what you would expect from random chance.
However, there is one basic weakness in studying dowsers. You cannot just call up the Dowser’s Union and ask them to send over a few journeyman dowsers, and please have them bring their certificates. All you can do is place an ad, asking for dowsers.
When your pool of self-described dowsers shows up, a large percentage will not actually be capable of the art. Some are people who obviously delude themselves. When you take their results and mix them in with people with a real ability, the percentage of accuracy is simply never going to reach the 95% that science requires for statistical significance. Only then, when the odds are twenty to one that your findings are not random, is it accepted by the scientific community.
Now, when a scientific report says ‘no difference’, it often does not really mean no difference. In fact, the differences could be five to one against random chance, but since only the twenty to one ‘gold standard’ is accepted as statistical significance, the conclusion will often be worded ‘no difference.’
Dr. Hans-Dieter Betz, at the University of Munich, is a little more imaginative than your run of the mill scientist, because he thought about this problem and decided to simply analyze the data in a different way. Instead of lumping everyone’s results together, he had 43 subjects make multiple attempts and then analyzed the results of each individual for statistical significance. He and his team found that about 2% of the volunteers could hit the nail on the head almost every time, and scored better than 95% significance, or twenty-to-one odds against his performance being a matter of luck. For the best individual, it was 1,700 to one that his success was not just due to luck.4,5
Dr. Betz then took these individuals and subjected them to further testing. Some proved remarkably sensitive. When blindfolded and asked to walk the length of a board, they were supposed to point to various pieces of steel pipe that would be placed on the ground along the way. This was repeated again and again, as the objects were moved at random. Some fascinating insights to the nature of the dowsing response emerged.
First of all, it became clear that these gifted individuals were leading the rod rather than the other way around. A split second before the rod moved, their muscles would twitch. In other words, they didn’t really need a rod.
Secondly, some were capable of reliably detecting differences in magnetism of only a few gammas, or ten times more sensitive than the average people in the Indian experiment and more than sensitive enough to locate the much stronger anomalies that we have seen at megalithic sites. Unlike many of the volunteers of the Indian experiment, they were also consciously aware of the changes when they chose to be.
Now, these results were all under laboratory conditions. Andrei Apostol wanted to know if the sensitives could perform in the field.
He knew that the first written reports of dowsing came from Germany in the 1500s, when miners used rods to locate underground bodies of metallic ores. (In Germany, as far back as 1747, such ores could also be located by looking for emissions of light from the ground.)6
In America, Apostol saw evidence similar to what we have found. He noticed how maps of magnetism and gravity again and again would show that ancient builders had singled out spots with anomalies in these forces and he, too, wanted an answer to the question, “How did they know?”
When he heard about Dr. Betz’s dowsing study, he immediately flew to Munich. He brought back one of the more talented individuals, a dowser that he managed to intrigue with this enigma of the ancient Americans, identified in the study. In New York, he loaded this man plus some very special equipment into his station wagon and headed west. Apostol was not one to wait around for grant money, he just withdrew his savings and left town.
In the back of the station wagon, the sensitive could lie prone with a blindfold on, wired up to Apostol’s apparatus that would measure any twitching of his arm muscles.
Andrei would use a random number generator to choose from a selection of possible routes through an ancient site on a gravity anomaly. (Such anomalies were sometimes chosen for megalithic structures in the Americas.) The same method was used to select the time he began this route.
In this way, the blindfolded volunteer wouldn’t know where he was. But, as it turned out, when the car crossed areas where gravity changed force, his muscles began contracting and only relaxed, as the car emerged out the other side, some 20 minutes later.
The dowser performed just as well standing up. Walking over the gravity anomaly of an underground cavern at Cave of the Mounds National Natural Landmark in Wisconsin, he produced the same pattern of muscle twitching. In other words, he could identify the location of a cave just by walking over a flat piece of ground above. (Fig. 5)
Apostol mentions in his report that certain Native American groups would require an apprentice shaman to be able to locate a cave blindfolded, and perhaps they did it in a similar way. His work was considered solid enough to be published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Scientific Exploration,7 and he was asked to present it at their annual conference in California. His scientific peers agreed that he was certainly onto something.
We agree, too. Several years later, we had cause to be particularly interested in his work, in connection with shamanism.
In recent years, several scientific studies have shown that humans are indeed sensitive to earth magnetism. Researchers have found traces of magnetite in humans, located in the sinuses of the ethmoid bone.8,9 Such natural magnetic crystals are found in virtually all animals that use the earth’s magnetic field to navigate, for instance salmon, pigeons, and dolphins.10
For many years, he worked with ‘the helmet’, as his volunteer subjects call it. It is an old football helmet wired so as to be able to produce 50 gamma magnetic fluctuations around the brain of a sitting subject. He chose this strength because it is consistent with the fluctuations often found in nature. His work has been publicized countless times in print and on television, because the results are so eerie.
Persinger reports that when he ‘flips on the switch’, approximately 30% of his volunteers report visionary-like experiences. These visions range from distortions of time and space to what the subjects call an encounter with the supernatural. Of course, much is determined by set and setting. If Persinger plays Gregorian chants in the background, a good percentage report having a religious experience. If he plays the theme notes from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, many report an experience similar to being abducted by a UFO.11
In our opinion, the giant outdoor laboratory that can confirm Persinger’s findings in the real world lies just outside Albuquerque, New Mexico. Here, in Petroglyphs National Monument, the divide between two major zones of differing geology is provided by the eons-old course of the headwaters of the Rio Grande River. In this area, we have the largest conductivity discontinuity in the lower 48 states. We also have the largest concentration of ancient Native American rock art in the US.
In the past few decades, the academic community has come to a consensus that most rock art was the work of shamans, illustrating their hallucinations during altered states of consciousness. This theory has been confirmed across the world in many other ancient cultures as well, and anyone interested in finding out more should explore the journal publications of Dr. David Lewis-Williams.
Was the Persinger effect the connection between conductivity discontinuity and rock art? I decided to take my instruments there and find out.
From the moment I got out of the car and walked into the rocks that have tumbled off this basalt escarpment in Petroglyphs National Monument, readings on the electrostatic voltmeter showed that the rocks had electrical charge and were electrifying the air around them. Background control checks made it clear that this was not something happening in the whole area, just where the basalt outcropped, just where the pictures were carved.
Late in the afternoon I had great luck. While measuring a distinctive outlying boulder with a carving of a shaman on it, the needle on the meter began to rise until it was off scale. At first only this rock seemed to affect the meter, but soon it became clear that there was in fact an enormous rise in electrification of the rock all along the escarpment. When the readings dropped a bit and the needle came back on scale, it was reading 8,000 volts per inch. This level of voltage is higher than we normally find in thunderstorms.
Running back towards the car, I made occasional stops for readings, showing that this disturbance had spread. Once in the car, I drove at 70 mph on the two-lane road, trying to get ahead of this spreading wave of electric charge. I raced a mile or so back up along the edge of the escarpment to the park’s Visitor Center and found that the disturbance had not hit there yet.
So I waited, and within ten minutes it showed. As I drove along the several-mile length of the park rocks, I was able to follow the spread of the anomalous charge. It took about 45 minutes to travel 3 miles.
Now, usually electric current travels faster than that. But this current was positively charged, not the lightning-fast electrons of what we usually think of as electrical current, but rather the heavier positive ions, which are slower moving. Whatever it was – it was extremely powerful.
When I returned to the Visitor Center for more readings, the rangers asked me what I was doing. They knew that this place was the nation’s largest conductivity discontinuity, and one of them told us something interesting.
With an amused smile, she said, “You know, sometimes I get these New Age types in here who tell me they just like to go up and sit in the rocks and ‘feel the energy.’ I always thought they were a bunch of flakes, but you’re telling me there just might be something to it.”
In this area, high ground in a still uninhabited marshland is sprinkled with magnetic anomalies, and rock chambers are built over many of them. One chamber has a special shaft aligned so that the rays of the rising sun on the winter solstice penetrate the heart of the chamber and illuminate a connecting miniature chamber, only three feet high. Visiting these sites, I experienced some surprises along the way.
The first one came during my walk down the trail behind Dave Barron, a laconic, white-haired Connecticut Yankee with a wickedly dry sense of humor. He had been president of the Gungywamp Society for what seemed like forever, at least to Dave. “I made the classic mistake in a non-profit foundation,” he told me. “I didn’t show up the day we selected a president, so they picked me, because I was not there to defend myself.” Of course, his work was so exceptional that no one ever wanted anyone else.
“You know, I’ve been taking people on tours of this place for 25 years, and I have heard some making these crazy claims about energies and ‘vibes’,” he said, pointing an index finger at his temple and making little circles.
“Lots of them brought dowsing rods and I thought, hey, let them have their little fun; it’s harmless. But over the years, I started to notice people getting the same reactions at the same spots, over and over again. So I decided to give it a try.”
Barron broke out his own dowsing rods: cut-off pieces of a wire hanger, bent and stuck loosely in plastic sockets, which he held at chest height. After a few minutes, they started spinning fast enough to produce a high-pitched whine, with the metal rods rubbing the edge of the plastic sockets as they twirled.
“See what I mean?” Barron smiled. “This is a pretty active day.”
Walking behind him, I looked at my electrostatic voltmeter, and every time we got to a spot where his rods twirled, my readings would spike. On one stretch of the trail, beside a row of standing stone slabs, his twirling and my meter peaked repeatedly at half a dozen spots, located equidistant to one another. At each spot, there seemed to be an electrified vertical curtain of air, about a foot thick, stretching clear across the trail. I didn’t believe it at first, so I double-checked and triple-checked. The columns of electrical air rose from the ground to as high as I could reach.
“See what I mean?” Barron said again. “On any active day, the rods go crazy here.”
What I was really hunting here, however, was not the dowsing response, or even the rock chambers. I wanted to visit the Cliff of Tears, about which I had heard so much. It was thus named, because a large number of people had simply broken down here and started sobbing uncontrollably – for no apparent reason.
However, Barron is a retired speech therapist and a no-nonsense New Englander.
“I didn’t put much stock in this stuff when I started giving tours. But then I began to witness something pretty funny. One day, I took a bus from Alcoholics Anonymous on a walking tour here, and four of them got nose bleeds, right at the Cliff of Tears! One or two I would have chalked up to coincidence, but four made me wonder. Then women I know and trust started telling me about spontaneously beginning to menstruate while standing there! So, we did a study. Nurses measured 20 volunteers that day. The one thing that changed to a degree of statistical significance was blood pressure.”
Walking on, Barron continued his banter, occasionally pointing out a particularly strong dowsing response. So I paid no special attention when at one point on this woodland trail, he casually gestured into the underbrush and, seemingly off the cuff, told me, “We usually get an interesting little energy line here, running up the hill.”
He kept walking, but when my voltmeter detected the line, my curiosity led me to follow it through unbroken underbrush, up a small hill. My progress was halted by a rock wall at the top, but about ten feet out from the base of this rock was a six-foot-wide circle, where the voltmeter reading was so strong and abrupt that it caused me to take the Lord’s name in vain. Behind me there was chuckling, evolving into outright laughter from the other members of the Gungywamp Society who had come with us.
This uproar was followed by Barron’s dry voice, “You’re standing at the Cliff of Tears.”
The electrostatic readings inside this 6-foot circle remained steady, so I turned my attention and my magnetometer on the cliff face itself. As I got close to it, the readings began climbing at an unexpected clip. Startled, I wondered what could be causing such a surge, until I saw a six-inch wide, brown band of magnetite ore, running horizontally across the face of the cliff, just above head height.
A remarkable and long-established ‘New Age’ center, called the Ojai Foundation, sits on a plateau of some power. Significantly, the Ojai Valley is the only place in California where the San Andreas Fault runs east-west. Since geomagnetic field lines run north-south, the lion’s share of the telluric ground currents they produce can be expected to do the same. This theory makes an east-west section of this part of the San Andreas Fault a powerful conductivity discontinuity. This has been confirmed by my own readings.
Ed Sherwood is an Englishman of unusual talents, married and settled in Los Angeles with his wife Kris. They did not know about the geology of Ojai, or about my instrument surveys there, when they selected it as the place to spend their wedding anniversary each year.
All they needed to know was that Ed could see light balls there, sometimes sporadic but often prevalent. These are the same sort of light balls that emerged in our photos from Tikal. (Figs. 9-13, Chapter 4)
Ed has a library of light ball photos, but the difference with him is that for years he has been able to feel their presence. He has been known to announce to a group of friends outdoors at night, “They’re here!” and begin snapping away. The light balls will show up in the photos, often shoulder to shoulder. When he announces, “They’re gone now,” his photos back him up. And when he pronounces, “Now they’ve moved over there,” again his photos confirm his statements.
In recent years, Ed has been able to train himself to see the light balls as well. He claims that he can train most people to see them too, if they are capable of total concentration and can spare a few days.
He first contacted me, and sent me photos, after discussing the light balls with the director of Ojai, who showed him my report, relating how, on two occasions, I measured the kind of rapid early morning alterations of geomagnetism seen near conductivity discontinuities.
One of these visits was full of wonder. On my first morning there, sunrise had technically occurred, but the sun could not be seen at Ojai. An odd fog pocketed this miniature sloping plateau. It was like pea soup, completely obscuring the sun and with these odd concentric rings extending above the rest of the fog bank in the direction of the sun.
I took magnetometer readings at the small stone circle made by Ojai visitors near the top of the plateau. Readings were quite uniform, until the sun broke through the fog and then, suddenly, sky-rocketed 400 gammas in 15 minutes.
As far as we know, this is not supposed to happen. It is known that telluric earth currents will jump when the sun breaks through a cloud or fog, allowing the fair weather electric field of the atmosphere to connect with the earth. These electric currents will produce changes in the local magnetic field, which will be exaggerated at a conductivity discontinuity.
However, in this case the normal morning change in the geomagnetic field was completely blocked, until the fog bank dissipated. Then the field jumped to where it should be and remained stable the rest of the day.
On the second day, which was clear, the normal geomagnetic field changes happened gradually. But this dense fog, while not quite violating the laws of physics, certainly stretched them. Therefore, we were tickled to learn that this spot had been labeled The Dragon’s Eye by a prior visiting group of Tibetan monks who chose it as their spot for morning meditations. They told the staff, “This is where the power is.”
The monks also indicated that the ridge stretching beyond the circle was highly powered, and in the afternoon of that first day, I saw why. About an hour before sunset, while I was walking along the ridge-top trail, readings on the electrostatic voltmeter began to soar. Even on the high setting, the needle danced back and forth in abrupt swings, until it finally climbed off-scale and stayed there.
We can count on one hand the number of times this has happened to us, so it is no surprise that sensitives like Ed Sherwood, the Tibetan monks, and thousands of others continue to return to the Ojai Foundation for mind-altering experiences of a natural order.
So I went, not really expecting to find much but, once again, learned the importance of an open mind.
Sedona certainly is staggeringly beautiful, surrounded by striking red rock cliffs and spires. Control readings, miles before I reached Sedona, showed me what I had expected: that all this red rock country is strongly magnetic. The red is, after all, from oxidized iron in the sandstone. This usually means that most, but not all, of the iron will be non-oxidized magnetite. Readings of 570 gammas in the vertical axis were a good 5 gammas more than I got before hitting ‘red rock country.’
After dining on buffalo steak, I drove out the dirt roads in the hills beyond to watch the magnetic readings drop. And drop they did. Readings fell hard and fast after sunset.
Within hours I had seen enough Kokopelli figures to last me a lifetime, and I also got my fill of the phrase ‘energy vortex’. Nevertheless, the following morning I dutifully obtained a map that located and gave directions to the most popular energy vortices. They were sandstone buttes at one end of town, vertical rock spires perched atop a humped base, hundreds of feet high, like images out of a John Ford western, filmed in Monument Valley.
As it turned out, they were centered on a negative magnetic anomaly (a spot with lower geomagnetic field strength) and lie at a gradient (or border zone) of two areas of differing magnetic field strength. This was the classic geomagnetic profile we had come to expect from earth mounds or rock chambers. The geomagnetic characteristics of the two vortices I visited here reminded me of what we had found in other spots that had natural electromagnetic energies powerful enough for Native Americans to have selected them for special purposes.
With a nod to Kokopelli, I drove off into a red rock sunset.
Shamans sought out these energies to alter their consciousness – something that still happens today among modern Native Americans.
The Black Hills of South Dakota have long been considered sacred ground by the Sioux, as well as by the tribes living there before them. The Black Hills are also one of the nation’s leading conductivity discontinuities – and again I wondered if there was a connection. There is.
For me, it started with a personal experience on Black Elk Peak (previously called Harney Peak), at 7,242 feet the highest point in the Black Hills, and long considered the most sacred peak.
Kaj and I had been busy measuring electrical ground current 200 feet below the summit, and now we needed a break. I leaned back with closed eyes, resting my head on the cliff face. Dizziness and disorientation were the immediate results. Raising the head out of contact with the rock stopped the effect, while contact would initiate it all over again. Getting up to inspect, I found that the rock in question was a vertical vein of quartz running through the cliff face. Our meter showed that it had strong electrical charge and was also charging the air next to it.
We surveyed the entire cliff face and found that this was only the case in two small spots, both of which were veins of quartz. This effect made perfect sense, because quartz stores electric charge like no other mineral, which is why it is used in watches.
Now we began to understand why the Sioux insisted in their treaties that no other reservation ground would do, they had to keep the Black Hills, whether or not the white man wanted them for gold. The following day we were to stumble into a tradition that is still very much alive today.
At the Black Hills Visitor Center, you can look down on a marvelous three-dimensional table map of the region. When you are wondering what might be an interesting site to visit, one stands out from the rest. The site, a lone spike in a flat land, lies to the north. If you travel south from Canada over one thousand miles of flat ground, this would be the first vertical break you encounter.
Bear Butte is a geological twin of Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, featured in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Both are volcanic plugs, highly metallic lava that cooled and hardened eons ago in the throat of volcanoes, which have themselves since eroded. But unlike its twin to the west, Bear Butte is still covered by dirt and looks simply like a tall, very steep hill with a razor-edged flat top.
Today this mountain is a state park with a trail. The signs read: Open to visitors during daylight hours only. All white visitors are banned from the park after dusk.
Then at the foot of the trail: Please stay on the path at all times. Respect native traditions. Do not touch any objects off the trail. These rules are seriously enforced. You are visitors here. These grounds are still actively used for religious purposes.
By the time we started up the trail, we noted two items of importance. Tied to the scattered trees were brightly colored pieces of cotton cloth, called prayer flags by Native Americans. And secondly, the place was littered with magnetic anomalies, running the gamut from 100 to 400 gammas, similar to what we have found on mounds.
Wherever there was a magnetic anomaly strong enough for our magnetometer to detect, the spot had been marked by a particularly dense cluster of prayer flags. Occasionally, a medicine bundle would hang suspended from a tree.
A stiff 25-knot breeze was blowing out of the north, and the prayer flags stood straight out, fluttering furiously and providing the only sound in this otherwise silent and deserted world.
At the densest cloth cluster of all, twin festooned trees framed a stunning panorama of the plains to the north, at the edge of a 1,000-foot cliff, containing the most powerful magnetic anomaly, an incredible 900 gammas, that we have ever found. (Fig. 6)
Leaning precariously over the abyss with the probe, we realized that this two-foot-wide anomaly on a projecting rock spire was exactly consistent with how lightning strikes will magnetize rocks.
Nearby was an altar-shaped stone that contained a quartz crystal and a clam shell, and the stone was marked with the names of visitors, including Lindsey Walking Eagle, Rick Thundershield, Crystal Highwolf, and Lillian Whirlwind Horse.
We continued, trudging up the steep trail, pulled irresistibly now by this eerie, compelling place. The top of Bear Butte is a flat ridge, about one hundred yards long, but at places only ten yards wide. From here, you look almost straight down on the roofs of the tiny dots of cars below.
As it turned out, the top contains five striking magnetic anomalies, detectable on our magnetometer. They had also been detected by someone else, because every single one of them had been prominently marked. In four of the five places, a shallow pit had been dug, each encircled by a low wall of rocks.
At 500 gammas, the fifth site was the strongest of the five ridge-top anomalies. Nearby, a sleeping bag was stashed in a tree. The site was unique. No hole, no wall, and, instead of a circle, it was surrounded by a square, five feet on one side. In the corners stood small piles of rocks, holding two-foot willow poles that marked the cardinal directions: a red cotton flag in the north, a yellow in the east, a white in the south, and a black in the west. Connecting the four flags, and forming the sides of the square, were strings covered with hundreds of knotted bits of brightly colored cloth. In the center of the square stood two erect Y-shaped willow sticks, holding up a long, horizontal willow stick. (Fig. 7)
It was apparent that the shaman had chosen the spot with the strongest magnetic activity.
The following week, his spiritual leader drove him to the foot of a butte in the Black Hills and walked him to the top. Here he was seated in an enclosure, similar to the one we saw atop Bear Butte, surrounded by an array of colored flags, knotted strings, and sticks. Identical flags marked the same directions that we had recorded. The sticks were all cut from a sacred willow that morning. It turned out that the horizontal willow stick held up by the two vertical, forked pieces was used to hold the medicine bundle of the shaman. It was left with the narrator who stayed alone for the night. There had been no extensive fasting, and no drugs were involved.
He sat here through the night, lost in personal thought. Near dawn (the time of the strongest geomagnetic fluctuations), his thoughts turned into visions. The first one was auditory, a drumming that swelled to such magnitude that he feared it would split his eardrums, until he realized the source of the deafening beats. As he looked down at the ground between his legs he could see ants, their feet touching the ground with each step, and he realized that they were the drummers, creating this roar.
Next, he noticed a thundercloud moving right at the butte until, at the last moment, it split in two, each half sweeping by him on either side. As this happened, faces materialized in the cloud wall and leaned out, stretching their necks as they loomed over him, screaming.
He related these events 15 years later and had never had another drink.
Persinger reported that the effect of geomagnetic fluctuations in humans is probably mediated by the pineal gland, which is most sensitive to the fluctuations late at night. The fluctuations are linked with increasing frequency of episodes of epilepsy, called the ‘sacred disease’ by the ancients because of its disproportionate occurrence in shamans and oracles.13 Such natural fluctuations are also linked with certain hallucinations.14
We also find it interesting to note that Persinger’s work has found the religious experiences associated with magnetic field fluctuations to take place in the brain’s temporal lobe.15 This region of the brain lies next to the temples. It is worth recalling the Olmec giant basalt heads that all had the north magnetic pole located at the temple by the carvers (Chapter 1).
The tradition of vision quest, which we had observed on Bear Butte, had been developed by the childhood friend and spiritual mentor of Crazy Horse, who led him to Bear Butte. A Sioux shaman, he taught the system of the colored flags and willow sticks to others, still identical in detail now, 150 years later.
The meadow by the parking lot here, loosely decorated with cotton ‘flags’, is where the Sioux would gather in the morning to wait for Crazy Horse to descend from the butte and preach his visions. (Fig. 8)
In Pine Ridge today, there are shamans who can pick out magnetic anomalies and use them to produce visions in their people. The National Park Service now allows Native Americans to continue ritual use of Devils Tower – Bear Butte’s geological twin.
Jiri Dvorak is a Czech hydrogeologist. His company uses scientific sensing equipment to spot the types of geological structures where municipalities can most profitably drill wells for water. These are the structures where water rises to the surface and therefore where natural springs occur most often. They are interfluves: the boundary between two different levels of aquifer.
In his long career of prospecting throughout Europe, Dvorak has found that these interfluves are by far the most prolific spots for hunting mushrooms.16 We knew from our research with electricity and plant growth that mushroom growth is dramatically amplified by even very low level electric currents in the ground.
As Gordon Wasson has amply demonstrated in the classic Flesh of the Gods,17 one sacred ritual of ancient, pre-Christian Europe centered around the conical mushroom fly agaric (Amanita muscaria). Its powerful, mind-altering properties were so prized by shamans that it was hunted to extinction on the Indian subcontinent (where yoga then was invented to replace it).
It is hard to exaggerate the importance of this fungus to Western consciousness. One set of Amanita users who, in the early 20th Century, still practiced a late Ice Age lifestyle were the Lapps, or Sami, of far northern Scandinavia and Russia. They were semi-nomadic reindeer herders, living in yurts and driving about in reindeer drawn sleighs.18
Their shamans wore pointed red hats, symbolizing the mushroom that was their sacrament. The shamans also wore red capes, symbolizing their flight through the air when they consumed the mushroom on their most sacred night of the year – the Winter Solstice (then December 25).
So from their mushroom hunting, the Eurasian shamans, the repository of knowledge in all pre-literate societies, would have known all about the growth-enhancing powers of these same types of geology that were selected by the megalithic builders.
For six years, Starr Fuentes trained with contemporary Mayan shamans in Meso-America. When she first heard of our hypothesis, she asked us, “So, do you think the ancient builders were following the ley lines?”
Ley lines, as described by Alfred Watkins, are a series of straight lines connecting ancient sacred sites. We told her no, because the ley lines we have seen on maps are too straight to be produced by any geological structures. But Starr explained, “I don’t mean those kinds of ley lines. I mean the ones that effect plants.”
She went on to explain how Mayan shamans know that to improve the health of a plant you can take it to a ‘ley line’, leave it for a period of hours or days (depending on the desired effect) and then bring it back home. We asked her how to find these ley lines, and she replied, “You just follow the clay”.19
Starr has no training in geology, and at that point did not know about our research regarding interfluves. But these energy-producing interfluves are typically associated with surface deposits of clay.
Thus, we have first-hand reporting from two continents about the observed connection between improved plant growth and the same geological phenomena that were harnessed by the megalithic builders. These builders, therefore, would have had two means of discovering appropriate locations: sensing and observation.
19Starr Fuentes, personal communication
Chapter 4: Return to the Lost World
“Maize lay undiscovered in a mountain cave underneath a large rock, until a bolt of lightning penetrated the cave and split the rock apart, revealing the seed.”
From Popol Vuh, sacred book of the Quiche Maya
Once arrived, we did what all first-time visitors do, go straight to the Grand Plaza, a World Heritage site and, incidentally, the spot depicted as the rebel base in the first Star Wars movie. Surely, we thought, this is where the power must reside.
So when our guide Luis knocked on our door at the Jaguar Inn, just before 3 A.M., Geoff, Kaj and I dutifully followed him into the pre-dawn darkness. Prior experience had taught us that this was the right time of the day to catch the geomagnetic fluctuations and telluric ground currents that we were stalking.
Atop what Coe and Diehl (see Chapter 1) had dubbed ‘Temple II’ – but what everyone else calls the King’s Pyramid – our small team set up. We used a fluxgate magnetometer to catch the geomagnetic changes, ground electrodes and a hundred feet of wire to measure the telluric currents, and two electrostatic voltmeters to measure electric charge in the air. We sat down and waited.
Few things can try your patience more than staring at a meter hour after hour. Computers were not feasible alternatives, as laptop batteries would not give us the amount of time we needed. We recorded magnetic changes and electric charge in the air, but nothing unusual – nothing we couldn’t find in the jungle far from the ruins, nothing we couldn’t find at home, for that matter.
The pyramid that we had just ‘staked out’ was one of the last ones built here. Around 600 AD, the people of Tikal were conquered by a northern tribe. After a century of subjugation, a rebel chief led a successful revolt, putting the locals back into power. In celebration of his triumph, two fantastic stepped pyramids were built, today popularly called the King’s and the Queen’s Pyramids.
The former is dead as a doornail, electrically speaking (Fig. 9), and the Queen’s has been off limits since a tourist, descending the steep staircase, tumbled down and broke his neck.
Most of the hundreds of other structures in this metropolis had been built before these two pyramids. So, we reasoned, the engineers of the early buildings would have had their pick of locations. If there was energetic ground around here it would have been theirs for the grabbing. The fact that a later, purely political, pyramid did not exhibit electrical charge suggested to us that the Olmec’s knowledge was possibly lost in the cultural collapse of the 7th Century. We decided to test our theory.
Erected around 600 BC, more than a thousand years before the more elaborate structures, it is much humbler than most of the newer pyramids, lower and flat on top. During the incredible 1,300 years that it had been in use, it was expanded six times. So we set our sights here.
On the first morning, we found impressive electrical and magnetic charges on top of this 100-foot pyramid. Elated as we were, our excitement this day was dwarfed by what we found on our next to last morning in Tikal (see Chapter 1).
Over 7 hours that day, our array of scientific instruments recorded an electrical dance of sorts between the atmosphere and our planet’s surface – a dance in which this 2,600-year-old structure acted as intermediary. The amount of electric charge in the air was greater than what we had usually found during thunderstorms.
Fortunately, we had obtained the assistance of the U.S. Geological Survey in Colorado, who had advised us in our purchase and use of ground electrodes. These electrodes showed that the ground of this tiny plateau was pulsing with the strongest electric currents we had found anywhere: up to 600 millivolts/kilometer. This reading is enormous for telluric currents. Intriguingly, it is in the same range as those measured on Piton de la Fournaise (see Chapter 1).
So perhaps the Olmec, who designed the first version of this pyramid, were in fact trying to duplicate something that happened naturally in their volcanic homeland, just as they seemed to be at San Lorenzo. However, measurements of current in the ground of the plateau surrounding the pyramid showed that while the whole miniature plateau was pulsing, it seemed to be the ground beneath the pyramid that was producing most of the action. Geologists use this method to identify certain subsurface geological features that are known to conduct current the best. It certainly looks as though the Lost World Pyramid was placed directly atop one of these. As we shall see in Chapter 10, the Americas are probably not the only place where this was done.
The top of the Lost World Pyramid was clearly concentrating this ground current, and linking up with an airborne electric field that ranged from 1,100 volts on the ground to 1,720 volts when we lifted a voltmeter over our heads to 8 feet. Airborne readings will normally rise with height because the ground and the atmosphere tend to carry opposite charges. But from ground level to 8 feet usually shows a difference of perhaps 90 volts or so (which is what had happened on the King’s Pyramid).
But here we had a significant difference: 540 volts averaged over eight readings on different days. One day these readings showed an average change of 908 volts from ground to 8 feet up, or ten times that of the gradient on the King’s Pyramid.
These voltages might sound lethal, and if it were household current, they could be. However, static electric charge in the air is a different type of electricity, and even 1,000 volts is not dangerous. In fact, you can generate a stronger charge by rubbing your hair with a rubber balloon. That’s why our hair did not stand on end atop the pyramid.
Nevertheless, these readings are way out of the ordinary and can have some profound biological effects, as we are about to see.
Furthermore, the electric charge in the air jumped dramatically at the time of official sunrise, for about 40 minutes or so. This is due to the change in the earth’s magnetic field at sunrise. But during three mornings on the Lost World Pyramid, it averaged 827 volts vs. only 186 volts on the King’s Pyramid.
Since such exaggerations of the dawn surge are known to be associated with certain geological configurations, it looked like the oldest pyramid was built on just that sort of ground, while the later ones were not. If the knowledge that had led to the building of the early pyramids was lost when Tikal’s rulers were overthrown, then the practical benefits would have also been lost. The electrically-dead King’s Pyramid had no effect on seed. It is interesting to note that not long after this possible cultural decay, the civilization of Mayan Tikal crashed.
Readings at the Lost World Pyramid were always higher on the four corners. Even below the top, holding a meter to a corner always gave 45-60 volts/inch stronger readings than any other part. This was in keeping with what science knows to be the behavior of electric charge. As mentioned earlier, geophysicists have made measurements atop Mexican volcanoes, showing that electric charge concentrates at sharp edges.
Perhaps this effect was copied by the Olmec from their volcanic homeland, and perhaps they shared this knowledge with the Mayans in building this very pyramid on which we now stood. As shown in Fig. 4, all these effects are in keeping with how electric ground charge is known to interact with electric atmospheric charge at a hilltop.
To get control readings for that morning, I hurried to the tallest pyramid in Tikal, Temple IV, a later structure that was built for political prestige, and where tourists today gather to watch the sunrise. None of the electrical forces were present here. Only the early Lost World Pyramid was pulsing with energy.
Building a pyramid has two complementary effects: It concentrates any electric charge in the ground at the top, and it bunches up the atmosphere’s electric field lines at the top. Fig. 4 also shows why you would think hard about whether or not to give your pyramid a pointed top or a flat one. If you have as much energy as seemed to be present at the Lost World plateau, and you concentrate it too much by using a pointed top (like an Egyptian pyramid), then in a rainforest environment with plenty of lightning strikes during thunderstorms, the amount of energy concentrated at the top may be too much for your purpose.
The main god of the Aztec, the Mayans’ cultural descendants, was Tlaloc, ‘He who makes things grow’. He was also god of rain and lightning,1 and the largest Aztec pyramid, on a scale with Egypt’s, was dedicated to him.
In fact, long before Mayan civilization, the Olmec began the tradition of bringing seed to altars in caves, decorated with fertility symbols, afterwards taking the seed home with them. From years in Asia, we knew that the Chinese, among others, do not waste such food offerings by throwing them away; they eat them. Leaving the offering for a day on an altar to the traditional earth god, for example, they then remove and consume it. Perhaps the Mayans took it home and planted it.
Anthropologists of the 19th Century reported common offerings of maize seed in Mayan caves with jaguar fertility figurines.3 Today, white-robed Mayans can be seen emerging from the jungle before dawn to perform ceremonies atop the pyramids of Tikal. Part of the ritual involves placing corn seed and beans on the highest stairs. After the gods have had time to ‘take the essence’ from the offering, the Mayans take it to their home to be used.4 They always miss some, and we found dozens of seeds scattered widely across the top of the King’s Pyramid.
One can easily imagine how all of this might have begun. If Mayans originally had caves that they used for rituals, perhaps visions quests, some of these caves might have become shrines where offerings were made. Every traditional culture uses offerings to the gods or nature forces that they revere. Food is the most common offering, and for Mayans the basic food staple has always been corn.
Now, if someone took corn seed home after it had been left for a while in a cave as an offering, planted it, and saw dramatically better growth, it would not take long for word to spread. Soon the cave would be thought of as a fertility cave. Then the Olmec introduction of pyramids could have been married to this tradition and we have the pyramids placed over or next to fertility caves, just what the ethnographers have reported.
As described in later chapters, we had previously placed seed on Native American earthen mounds in central U.S., as well as in pre-Columbian rock chambers in New England – which look like artificial caves – with fascinating results. Here, at Tikal, we brought dried local corn seed, purchased a few days before in a Mayan hill town. This local corn seed was not high quality, which was precisely what we wanted: seed whose vigor was as close as possible to the ancient stocks that were in use before modern breeding and seed handling.
We spread the samples on the flat rock atop the pyramid and waited, still taking readings on our instruments (Fig. 13). While the howler monkeys roared and birds started calling, the early morning fog drifted eerily through the treetops level with our vantage point, dawn returning colors to the world.
The photos of these germinated seeds revealed some remarkable results. The Mayan corn seed that we spread out on the electrically inactive King’s Pyramid (Fig. 15) did no better than the control seed kept in our hotel room (Fig. 14). In fact, they did a bit worse – probably the influence of the heavy dew that settled on them that morning. But growth of the seed placed the first morning on the electrically active Lost World Pyramid was clearly improved (Fig. 16). And, finally, seed left atop the Lost World Pyramid on the day of highest electrical activity was drastically improved (Fig. 17).
Furthermore, our Tikal photos were bursting with visible confirmation of these electromagnetic forces. On several prior occasions, we had noticed that balls of light appeared in flash photos taken at ancient sites.
As Dr. Levengood explained it, the photons of the flash add energy to the already energetic molecules of the electrified air. These molecules absorb this extra energy, driving them to a still higher energy state. Within a fraction of a second, however, the molecules drop back down to their original energy state, radiating the extra flash energy as light. All this happens too fast for the eye to catch, but not for the camera.
Since we had recorded the actual times of exposure for our photos as well as the times of all instrument readings, we could confirm that the photos were choked with overlapping light balls when the air was highly electrified (Figs. 10 and 11). As the amount of electric charge dropped, so did the density of these light balls in photos taken at the same vistas (Figs. 12 and 13).
All the factors that we went to Guatemala to look for had now come together and had been recorded. We were on our way to linking a series of startling findings into a coherent picture.
