Seed of Knowledge, Stone of Plenty: Chapters 7 & 8 by John Burke and Kaj Halberg

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Swedish anthropologist Åke Hultkrantz (1920-2006) in his book The Religions of the American Indians.¹

To answer that question, we must go back to the times when corn farming spread northwards from Meso-American cultures, spreading certain other aspects of these cultures with it.

Throughout the middle portion of the United States, thousands of Native American earthen mounds still stand, hugging their histories close to their hearts. I was trying to tease out these histories, and frostbite nearly cut my attempt short.

The center of the early Adena and Hopewell mound building was around the modern town of Chillicothe, Ohio. United States Geological Survey magnetic maps show that the town and its surroundings lie between two large regions of powerful magnetic fields to the north and south.

Running east-west between these areas is Paint Creek, along which countless mounds and earthworks were erected. Almost none were placed further north or south, outside this magnetic transition zone. In Hopewell Culture National Historical Park at Chillicothe, a few dozen mounds survive on the flood plain of Paint Creek. Every mound over six or eight feet high was placed on a single magnetic anomaly strong enough to be detected by our magnetometer.

The mounds are round with one exception. Where there had been a line of positive magnetic anomalies in the ground, the Hopewell builders erected a linear mound, whose ridge runs across all the anomalies. The largest group of these mounds is surrounded by a henge-like ditch.

Someone had sought out spots with powerful magnetic anomalies and decided to build mounds there. Many Hopewell and Adena sites were anything but modest piles of dirt. Some stood several stories high and contained hundreds of thousands of cubic feet of earth – all laboriously heaped up by hand. Archaeological excavations have shown that these structures were built by people scraping earth into baskets that would be carried on their back to the site, up the existing mound, on top of which it was dumped – repeating the process endlessly.²

Mound building in North America was brought to its zenith c. 800-1400 AD by the Mississippian Culture, named for the huge river that was their center of activity.

During a period of population density that was unparalleled in pre-Columbian North America, the Mississippians built the largest earthen mounds the country has ever seen. At their great center at Cahokia, Illinois, they raised a giant, flat-topped pyramid, rivaling in volume the great pyramids of Giza in Egypt, as well as a few dozen smaller mounds. (Fig. 33)

For several hundred years, Cahokia was the most spectacular settlement north of Mexico. At its peak, about 1300 AD, it was home to about 30,000 people, exceeding the population of London at the time.³ Not until Philadelphia, around 1800 AD, did an American city grow larger.

At least 383 other villages of this culture bordered the Mississippi River between the Ohio and Red Rivers, and thousands of others spread up and down its tributary streams, as far afield as the Missouri River in South Dakota. Though a few mounds contained some skeletons, most had nothing to do with burial. Yet these mind-boggling, laborious creations were built in the hundreds throughout this region by different tribes using different languages. (Fig. 34)

Incredibly, in most cases the builders did not even use the dirt closest to the mound. They usually went some distance for special clays that were then applied in layers, one type at a time. When you consider that these local populations usually numbered no more than a few thousand people, what would compel them to dedicate hundreds of thousands of man-hours of backbreaking work to haul clays from a distance, only to dump them out and pile them up? What made these mounds worth such staggering effort?

Like the Adena, the Mississippian Culture was not one tribe, but a way of life that included many tribes. One characteristic of this culture was the intensive farming methods imported from Meso-America, e.g. growing two crops of 120-day-corn per year in the same field.⁴

Even today, no farmer double-crops like this, unless there is a serious need to get more food from the land. For one thing, there are substantial risks in double-cropping. If one of the plantings experiences unusually cool weather, then those plants will take longer to reach harvest maturity, posing the risk that the reduced number of days now left for the second planting to mature may be insufficient. Even today, this is not an uncommon experience for double-croppers, and the result is that the second planting does not mature before winter and the entire crop is lost.

Were the mounds partly built for this very reason? Were they constructed in a way that would improve the seed in the same manner as is accomplished with the modern electron showers that we discussed in Chapter 2?

If this were so, then the Mississippian crops would have matured sooner, making it more likely that both 120-day-corn crops could reach full maturity. As we know from our experiments with these energies in the New England rock chambers (Chapter 6), the additional value would be that both crops would produce substantially higher yields.

Archaeological excavations had shown that the mound itself was not magnetic, so it had to be the ground under the mound. The creators had decided to build the mound directly on a magnetic anomaly.

Our surveys of the electric charge in the air above the larger mounds produced readings that were some of the highest we had ever encountered in nature. Both these and the magnetic readings varied widely between night-time and midday. Given all this data, it seems clear that the building of these mounds probably had something to do with electromagnetic energy.

We had brought a set of ground electrodes to detect telluric currents in the ground. Such currents are normally quite steady, but at the mounds they were anything but. Here, they sometimes pulsed in rough unison with the magnetic and airborne electrostatic changes in a way that was consistent with known physics, but not normally seen.

The river connection is relevant. The vast majority of major Native American mounds are located on high ground bordering a river, granted the rivers were the highways. English henges (as we shall see in Chapter 9) were built in the same type of locations. Furthermore, both the American and the English builders ran ‘avenues’ lined by ditches from the water’s edge to the mound, for reasons that we shall revisit.

The famous Serpent Mound in Ohio is a quarter mile long embankment, built by Native Americans in the shape of a writhing snake. (Fig. 35) Long credited to the Adena, about 500 BC, recent carbon-14 dating has proven that it was actually engineered by the later master mound builders, the Mississippians, around 1070 AD.⁵

This combination got our attention, because in the Mississippian Culture the snake symbolized fertility. In fact, in their mythology the serpent was considered the source of all plant life.⁶A frequently used symbol of fertility was that of a serpent rising out of the ground in the form of a plant.⁷

On our first visit to Serpent Mound, we encountered dramatic readings. Heavy gusts of wind, charged to 1,000 volts per inch, were blowing in from the northeast and the direction of other native mounds. This might sound fatal, but the current is so low it has little impact on people. We thought, though, that it might have an impact on seeds.

On the side of Serpent Mound, we placed seeds in porous cotton gauze bags – but we were disappointed. While the seeds showed the same type of improvements that we had associated with New England rock chambers, the differences were small. The seeds left on the mound grew only 8% faster than the control seeds. Were we missing something?

In the mythologies of mound-builder cultures throughout Meso-America and the U.S., man-made rock chambers and natural caves were linked with mounds, fertility, corn, seeds, water, and one other ingredient – lightning.⁸We had worked with all of these factors but the last.

One day, at the 64-foot-tall Grave Creek Mound in West Virginia, after the passing of a thunderstorm, the telluric currents reached an astonishing 3 volts/km, the highest we have ever recorded anywhere. In the flat ground surrounding the mound the currents were not even near that level.

Then, in August 1996, we brought seeds of corn and beans to Serpent Mound, on a day when a thunderstorm struck. There is a certain poetry to this when you consider that in Mayan literature like the classic Popol Vuh – and also among Mayan ethnic groups today – the serpent symbolizes lightning,⁹ while in the Mississippian mound-building culture, it represented fertility.

At three different locations on the writhing flanks of the mound, we placed bags of three different types of seed for differing lengths of time. The thunderstorm moved in, and ultimately lightning got to within one or two miles of the mound. During its 2-hour approach, something amazing was happening.

From the time we began taking readings on our magnetometer, at 2:06 P.M., the readings plunged. Starting at a normal fair-weather level, the magnetometer readings dropped several times further than we had ever before measured anywhere. This drama continued as the lightning got closer. In near disbelief, we installed a new battery, but that didn’t make any difference. Something radical was happening to the magnetic field. Ultimately, we had to cease measuring and retrieve the last of the seed, when downpours began at 3:57 P.M.

There is no doubt that these dramatic magnetic fluctuations were produced by powerful electric currents, streaming through the bluff under Serpent Mound. Thunderstorms are known to induce such currents in the ground. Without them, lightning would never strike. These telluric currents alter the local magnetic field by producing a magnetic field of their own. If the new field is opposed to the normal one, it will weaken it and thereby lower magnetometer readings. It was obvious that beneath Serpent Mound the telluric currents were coursing through the 90-foot bluff that sticks out into the valley like a peninsula. It is composed of solid dolomite, a particularly electrically conductive form of limestone with a high content of magnesium.

We knew that the terrain was unusual. Flanked by two streams, Serpent Mound sits within a strange geological structure called a crypto-explosion crater. Millions of years ago, a 5-mile-wide bowl was carved out of the earth here by a massive explosion. The entire center of the crater is one large negative magnetic anomaly. Near the center sits the dolomite bluff, which was artificially flattened by the mound builders, who left only a thin covering of soil atop the dolomite. Then the serpent was laid down with alternating layers of clay, carried up ninety feet from the stream beds below. On one side of this bluff is a small cave, located just below the serpent’s head.¹⁰

With the cave, the mound, the serpent, the seed, and lightning, we now had all of the elements of mound-builder fertility imagery present in a real, physical form. What happened to the seeds placed on the mound left no doubt at all that the ‘fertility’ of Maya myth was also present in physical form. As shown in Fig. 36, the seeds placed on the mound grew dramatically faster and more uniformly than the control lots kept in our car near the mound or those left behind in the lab. The differences were statistically significant.

The improved growth closely correlated with the changing telluric ground currents and their magnetic fields. The least growth improvement was seen in the seeds placed on Serpent Mound before the electromagnetic changes got very large. The greatest growth increases were attained in the seeds placed on the side of the Serpent, at the height of the electrical and magnetic disturbance, growth improvements similar to our results atop the Lost World Pyramid (Chapter 4).

It wasn’t just the mounds. They also dug ditches that bear striking resemblance to the henges of England (Chapter 9). In Ohio, these ditches were often created in geometric patterns, enclosing dozens of acres and, as we shall see, concentrating electric ground currents. How did the Hopewell do this, and how did they become wealthy beyond any others who came before them?

Today, Dr. Lepper is the State Archaeologist of Ohio. The work that put him in this position includes papers published in peer-reviewed journals, citing a fundamental puzzle. The Hopewell wealth shows up in grave goods and excavations in the form of luxury items, including mica from the Rocky Mountains, copper from northern Michigan, seashells from the Gulf of Mexico, and more.¹¹

But try as he might, Dr. Lepper couldn’t find what the Hopewell themselves exported to pay for these items. Well, they did make fine flint hoes that have turned up in archaeological sites up to a hundred miles away, but not in sufficient quantities to have counterbalanced the expensive imported items.

“There is a missing factor here,” he told us.¹² This reminded us of a similar statement made by two Olmec archaeologists. For the Hopewell, as for the Olmec, the only thing they seemed to possess, that others did not, were mounds.

I went there with my instruments, determined to get some answers. However, I arrived in winter – and soon came to wish I hadn’t. Many of the electromagnetic forces discussed in this book are strongest in warmer weather. The rock chambers, described in Chapter 6, often show no charge separation and no pulsing in temperatures below freezing. The abilities of other factors involving interactions of chalk and limestone with water are also temperature dependent. However, magnetic anomalies are usually permanent and can be measured any time of the year.

In the Hopewell Culture, the larger the magnetic anomaly, the larger they would build the mound above it. So, trudging through several inches of snow in Cahokia State Park, I definitely had high expectations of what would pop up on the magnetometer. Facing a bitter winter wind, I struggled to the top of the biggest earthen mound in the world, the so-called Monk’s Mound – at 22,000,000 cubic feet having a volume almost equal to that of the Khufu pyramid in Egypt.

This massive mound rises one hundred feet above the Illinois plain. Standing up here in the snow, exploring a new frontier of knowledge, I gazed across the river to St. Louis and its magnificent arch – a memorial to the pioneers who went west from here to explore and inhabit a different frontier.

And to add insult to injury, I encountered an unexpected difficulty on the fourth reading. The LCD readout had frozen and refused to show the numbers. To properly read a magnetometer a person must stand completely still for several minutes. In sub-zero wind chill, the body begins to rebel, and I was shivering from the cold.

However, over the next two and a half days, I developed a routine: take a reading; stuff the magnetometer inside the down jacket against my chest to keep the readout from freezing; walk a hundred yards as briskly as possible; stop; unzip down jacket and remove magnetometer; try to stand still and not shiver; repeat.

Hundreds of repetitions later, by the second day, my efforts paid off. A geographic pattern emerged from the readings, one that would bear out and ultimately answer some of the long-asked questions about this mysterious site: dozens of mounds – totaling sixty million cubic feet in volume – were laid down on a ‘magnetic grid.’

The one square mile that contains the major structures of Cahokia, lies at a transition zone between an extensive region of lower magnetism (54,000 gammas) to the north and west, and a large area of higher magnetism (54,400 gammas) to the south and east. Though this difference may sound small as a percentage of the geomagnetic field strength, it is actually a large difference when you are analyzing the earth’s field. This difference makes the entire Cahokia site a conductivity discontinuity – in other words, it is the meeting place of two regions that have differing abilities to conduct electric ground current. As we have seen, such spots tend to be especially powerful for electromagnetic energies.

In Chapter 2, we discussed the principle of induction: that changing magnetic field strength will create electric current in anything present that will conduct electricity. The same principle is true for the ground. At dawn, the changing strength of the geomagnetic field generates telluric currents that race through the ground, near the surface. Again, nature is rarely simple. These telluric currents do what any electric current does: they generate their own magnetic fields that will reinforce or weaken the geomagnetic field at that spot, depending on which way they are polarized.

As we saw in Chapter 2, these natural geological sites, called conductivity discontinuities, can magnify the daily geomagnetic fluctuations several-fold. And, since their fluctuations generate electric currents, the normal daily telluric currents at such a spot can be magnified several-fold.¹³ Finally, a negatively charged telluric current in the ground will attract positively charged particles and fields in the atmosphere, as we saw atop the oldest Mayan pyramid.

Our ancient mound builders repeatedly sought out places with such natural electrical activities. When you have, as at Cahokia, two large zones of differing magnetic field strength, it normally means that one zone possesses more magnetized iron underground than the other. The ability of the ground to conduct electricity is proportional to its content of water and/or metals. The wetter or more metallic, the better electric current will travel through it.

Cahokia’s largest mound was erected at the edge of a creek. Most of the Hopewell and Mississippian mounds were built near the edge of a flood plain, which would be inundated in spring, just before seeds were planted. Within a floodplain, a zone of magnetic transition will add fuel to the fire, so to speak, as far as maximizing ground currents. The only thing that will do better is a thunderstorm.

For a century, investigators have been asking why the Cahokia mounds are on two great axes. In the center of the complex, a north-south line occurs with readings of 54,200 gammas – lower than the 54,300 on either side of it. This is the central axis of Cahokia, with the largest mounds and the great central plaza. Now, obviously not every piece of ground on the 54,300-gamma frontier is covered with a mound. In fact, the mounds were sited where there was also an additional, small, individual magnetic anomaly.

Whatever was occurring here, it made the Cahokians rich, and lavish trade goods flowed in from all over North America. Yet the Cahokians had no special resources to exchange in return. There was something about the mound complex, though, that apparently aroused the envy of their neighbors to such a degree that the residents erected the largest fortifications in the history of pre-Columbian North America to protect it.

A palisade, 20 feet high, made of trees a solid foot thick, was thrown up all the way around the 2.5-mile perimeter. It did not enclose most of the houses or the rich cornfields. But, it did protect the mounds – and protected them well. Every 20 paces, a tower jutted out so that archers could shoot down on enemies attacking the walls. The logs themselves were covered by a thick coat of dried clay, so that flaming arrows could not ignite them.¹⁴

Apparently, other tribes wanted the mounds badly enough to kill and die for them. When the stockade eventually weakened with decay, the Cahokians would build another, using 20,000 massive trees each time. This happened three times, deforesting the area.

Cahokians did make beautiful statues and figurines for themselves. In other areas throughout the country at that time, such figurines mostly dealt with warfare. In what Professor Emerson calls a ‘highly unusual’ exception, Cahokia’s art concentrates obsessively on one theme – plant fertility.¹⁵

Two famous female figurines unearthed at Cahokia exemplify this theme. One kneels on ears of corn, and the other bends her farmer’s hoe to a serpent which wraps around her and from which vines grow. Authorities agree that this combined motif represents fertility.¹⁶ Were these symbols part of religious rituals at the site?

Cahokia was finally abandoned around 1300 AD, probably due to persistent floods from a permanent increase in rainfall about that time.¹⁷ We shall never know in detail what went on at the site – despite the artist’s depiction in Fig. 33.

Fortunately however, further downriver in Louisiana, the Natchez tribe of the Mississippian Culture continued using mounds right up to the early 1700s, when French colonizers interacted with them. Jesuit priest Father Le Petit wrote back to his superior in 1730 that a temple of wood stood atop the Natchez’s earthen pyramid. No farmer, he reported, would think of planting his fields without first “presenting the seed, with accustomed ceremonies, in the temple”.^18,19

Excavations have shown that all Mississippian mounds had a thatched roof ‘temple’ on top. As we shall see later, there are many reasons why these mound-top buildings should have experienced the same type of electromagnetic changes as Serpent Mound when a thunderstorm rolled through. However, by having a roof overhead, anyone placing seed in a Mississippian mound-top temple would not have to scramble to remove the seed when downpours arrived. This way the seed could be left at the place with the most dramatic electromagnetic changes, during the peak period of those energies.

What was the Mississippian ‘seed temple’ like inside? According to the earliest European visitors to the Natchez who passed through the area with De Soto’s expedition in 1540, its outer room contained a constant fire, tended by old men who were executed if they allowed either of two things to happen. If the fire went out, they were dead. They would also be killed if they allowed the simmering, smoking fire to break out into open flame.²⁰ This ‘eternal fire’ was to have no flame. No one could offer an answer to the early European explorers asking the reason for this. The tribal priests simply said that it had to be this way.²¹

You can confirm for yourself at your home barbecue that smoke is one large cloud of negatively electrified air particles, or ions. Flame, on the other hand, has very little electrical charge to it. The Mississippians desired only the negatively charged type of fire. Since they deliberately left out any chimney or smoke hole in the roof, these charged particles gathered thickly inside. This outer room of the wood temple was one big repository of negative air ions – the same kind as delivered by thunderstorms.

The inner sanctum was even more intriguing. It was a clay version of the rock chambers, in which we enhanced seeds (Chapter 6). Its wattle-and-daub frame of sticks and cane was covered with mud, lined with clay inside, and then covered over in reed mats. It was round and had a domed roof. There were no windows, and the only entrance was through a door, 4 feet high and 3 feet wide,²² similar to the rock chambers.

Combined with the effects of the electrified smoke and the magnetic anomaly on which the mounds were sited, this structure created conditions similar to what we found in the rock chambers. It appears that the mound builders exposed their seed to the same seed-enhancing energies as in our rock chambers. We therefore note with interest that the crops on Natchez farms were known for being unbelievably lush and fertile.²³

According to this highly detailed and credible account, they only had two ears left and these were two years old. Everyone feared the corn was dead and would not sprout when planted. But when they planted it in the ground beside the great mound, it flourished, replenishing their stock of both food and seed corn. They were sufficiently struck by this phenomenon that they stayed there and made the mound the center of their new homeland.²⁴

We confirmed that this mound was also built atop a strong magnetic anomaly, spilling beyond the mound in its current form. One muggy summer afternoon, at Nanih Waiya State Park, I found dramatic surges in readings during an approaching thunderstorm. Ultimately, I was chased off the mound by bolts that seemed to zero in on it when they began striking.

Of all the improvements in seed that we have seen, the most dramatic changes always seemed to occur with low vigor seed, just what the Choctaw had. This has been true both with seed left at ancient sites as well as that treated with the modern version of these energies.

In Choctaw, Nanih Waiya means ‘The Productive Mound’.²⁵ Another interesting translation is ‘to bear’ or ‘to bring forth’.²⁶ Though most tribes had to move their farms once or twice a generation due to soil exhaustion, the Choctaw never seemed to suffer from this problem, and their settlements stayed constant over the years.²⁷

This alone was an exceptional accomplishment. Upstate New York is one of the few places where we have quantitative yield figures for early Native American farmers. Jesuits missionaries living among the Mahican or Mohegan tribe estimated that the tribe’s fields yielded 27 bushels per acre.²⁸ Early 19th Century settlers in the same area, who also practiced slash-and-burn agriculture and planted their corn Indian style, got yields of 20 to 30 bushels per acre. Within 8 to 12 years, as soil exhaustion set in, yields would fall to between 7 and 10 bushels per acre, and the entire village would have to move.²⁹

The Mohicans did not have rock chambers. It also bears remembering that these early farmers did not use fertilizer or crop rotation. The myth of Samoset teaching the Pilgrims to put fish heads in the corn holes for fertilizer has never been substantiated by experts in the field.³⁰

Our own intensive searches through the Library of the Museum of the American Indian produced only some references to the spreading of ground-up shells on fields in the Carolinas, which would raise the calcium content of the soil but not its real fertility. In fact, early white observers in western New York described Indian agricultural practices in great detail without ever mentioning any use of fertilizers.³¹ In Virginia, an observer as early as 1587 noted of Indian farmers, “The ground they never fatten with muck or dung or anything”.³²

Somehow the Choctaw managed to prevent their yields from falling. It is interesting that the Mohegans were not mound builders. This reminds us of the dichotomy observed in Chapter 1 regarding the Olmec, that villages with a mound enjoyed a higher standard of living than villages without one.

About the time that the great mound center of Cahokia was abandoned, it was replaced by a major Mississippian center in today’s Moundville, Alabama. Around 1250 AD, this 300-acre center of multiple flat-topped mounds mushroomed into existence like a planned community. Perhaps the most learned expert on this site, archaeologist Jim Knight of the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, says that the mounds symbolized sacred mountains. They were thought of as hollow, representing caves from which, myths say, the first people emerged.³³ This is reminiscent of the beehive-shaped stone ‘burial’ chambers, lying hidden inside some of the Adena mounds.

For the Mississippians, this death motif was associated with the serpent, as well as with fertility. This was no coincidence. Numerous traditions tell of sacred ‘bundles of fertility’ and of renewal presented by deities. “It was believed that through the spirits of dead relatives the Creator would help the living”.³⁴ This linkage may help explain the frequent burials at mounds.

Other Mississippian tribes, such as the Cherokee, employed a combination of chamber and mound. Beehive-shaped rock chambers, both with and without skeletons, have been found at the bottom of mounds. Before any mound was erected, a hut like the Mississippian temples was constructed with a fascinating array of contents. Into these huts corpses were interred, wrapped in bark – just as the dead had been in the earlier Adena mounds. Interestingly, the Cherokee would often germinate seeds in beds of bark before planting. We will see more possible connections between skeletons and seed fertility in Europe.

Next to the Cherokee skeletons were beehive-shaped clay vaults. Located as far north as North Carolina, they were comparable in form and size to the smaller chambers of New England, three to five feet high. In the words of one excavator, “This was partially filled with rotten bark, human bones, and dark decomposed matter”.³⁵ (We would love to know if the decomposed matter included seed.)

The builders occasionally crafted semi-circles of these small beehive chambers, clustered around what would become the center of the mound. These were a people whose central mythological image was that of ‘caves’ of fertility inside sacred mountains.

In Meso-America, where the corn-centered culture emerged and eventually spread, such caves were considered the ‘home of seeds’ and the source of fertility. The Mayan glyph for fertility depicts a cave with a beehive inside.³⁶

Archaeologist Henry Mercer, University of Oklahoma, was brought by his Mayan guides to Oxkutzcab, where they entered an oblong mound by a low door to find a well-preserved rock chamber inside. At twelve by six feet, it was similar in size to the New England chambers. His guides led him on another hundred feet to what they called ‘The Cave of the Serpents’, with all its fertility associations.³⁷

Aztec and Maya pyramids were sometimes erected over sacred caves. The largest, the Aztec Pyramid of the Sun, almost equals the Great Pyramid of Giza. It was placed squarely over a previously used ‘oracular’ cave that had seen much use and had been artificially re-shaped through tunneling and wall-building.

The cave itself was a portion of an extinct flow tube of lava – a highly magnetic mineral. It had been artificially altered into a four-leaf clover, or quatrefoil shape – the seat of fertility. Mayan art frequently depicts corn foliage emerging from a quatrefoil cave.³⁸ Quatrefoil chambers inside mounds are found throughout the Old World as well, for example at Newgrange, or Sí an Bhrú, in Ireland.

In the words of archaeologist Doris Heyden, “The cave or grotto is the place where sustenance is kept, it is the depository of seeds”.³⁹ Items buried within the Pyramid of the Sun, dedicated to Tlaloc, the fertility god, included a complete skeleton of a jaguar, long the icon of plant fertility throughout Meso-America.^40,41

One Aztec emperor, after a vicious famine in 1250 AD, launched a project, which required reshaping an entire hill, called Texcotzingo. At the foot of this hill was an artificial cave. Early Spanish chroniclers reported that every spring priestesses of the maize goddess, named ‘Seven Serpent’, would bring the best seed corn from last year’s harvest up Texcotzingo to the temple of the maize goddess and would leave it there long enough for certain blessings.

Despite the fact that most of their fields were left fallow, or unplanted, in any given year, these 16th Century Aztec farmers grew so much corn that they comfortably supported a population density greater than that of western Europe at the time.⁴² Such caves are, in fact, still considered by modern Aztec descendants, the Nahuatl, to be the natural home of seeds.⁴³

The Hopewell would leave certain patches of ground intact, creating breaks or ‘causeways’ that would allow all the current blocked by the ditch to rush through, directing the current flowing through a wide area into a tight bottleneck of intact ground. Many acres were enclosed this way, like the flood plain of Paint Creek near Chillicothe, Ohio. Today, most ditches have disappeared, leveled by farmers; others are still visible at places like Hopewell Culture National Historical Park.

Just inside these bottlenecks, the Hopewell often placed mounds, further concentrating the telluric currents and ‘charging’ the mounds (Figs. 38-39). As we shall see in Chapter 9, a similar technique was used in England 5,000 years ago, to construct causewayed enclosures and henges. This concentration of telluric currents at these particular points would create a node or duct, bridging the natural electromagnetic energies of the atmosphere and the land.

Thus, American mound builders were connecting the energies of Mother Earth and Father Sky. ‘Ceremonial centers’ is the term archaeologists have applied to these groups of mounds, and we see no reason to argue with this name. We must remember, however, that our modern idea of ‘ceremonial’ means ‘no physical effect’ of any consequence. This need not have been true in the minds of the ancients.

In his book Indians of North America, Harold Driver writes⁴⁴, “The distinction between natural and supernatural was never sharply drawn by Indians, who tended to blend the two into a harmonious whole…A certain amount of practical science often went along with the supplication of the supernatural. For instance, Indian farmers everywhere combined practical science with religion and magic. One without the other was inconceivable.”

Authority Åke Hultkrantz boldly states that, “The chief role of American Indian religion was to help the crops grow better”.⁴⁵

And so we see, everywhere, connections between earth and sky, between the New World and the Old, between the physical and the ceremonial.

An unfathomable 6,700 years ago, inhabitants in one corner of France began raising enormous standing stones and rock chambers. Two thousand years before Egypt saw its first pyramid, these French ‘engineers’ had zeroed in on energetic ground and seemed to be harnessing it.

Mereaux was the right person to investigate. Trained as an engineer in applied thermodynamics, his technical skills and persistent, organized approach were the best means to make sense of this small region, which contains about 11,000 standing stones and dozens of chambers. It would take a greater challenge than this to intimidate a man who had spent World War II blowing up bridges for British Intelligence in German-occupied Belgium.

Mereaux was convinced that more was going on in ancient France than met the eye – something that involved invisible forces, detectable by the instruments he brought to bear year after year.

However, let us start at the beginning.

For 2,000 years or more, farming remained primarily a part-time activity, practiced by bands of hunter-gatherers.²No one was anxious to give up the nature-based traditional lifestyle. Far from the ‘feast or famine’ image we were taught, nomadic hunters had varied diets and lived longer, healthier lives than sedentary farmers, who ate a monotonous diet and were therefore riddled with deficiency diseases.

Full-time agriculture was eventually embraced as a way of life in Europe, but on a spotty basis, and it was not driven by envy of the farming life, but rather by sheer desperation.

In the early days of Stone Age Europe, many hunter-gatherer tribes lived near the coast. Here, particularly in estuaries, food was abundant: fish, crabs and shellfish, fat seals, and seabirds breeding in large colonies, where eggs were plentiful. Oysters in particular, rich in calories and tasty, formed an important mainstay of the diet for these people. Being able to feed many children, these bands flourished, and populations became dense around these estuaries and coastal marshes. The formerly nomadic people became sedentary. Life was good.

Then a major change in climate during the 5th millennium BC produced a dramatic increase in rainfall, changing the salinity of the estuaries. This killed whole populations of oysters, which can only reproduce in narrow ranges of salinity. And just like that, a major food source vanished, taking with it a brief Golden Age.

What had been a comfortable population density now became deadly. Too many people had lived stationary lives for many generations, thanks to the abundance of shellfish. The other natural food sources of the sea were not enough to feed the population, and returning to a normal hunter-gatherer economy inland was simply not an option. Over time, the inland territories had become occupied by other bands. There was simply no new land to which to move.

These people literally had their backs to the sea, and their situation was desperate. Lacking any real choice, they turned to the only alternative available – full time farming.³Only in this way could they feed their dense population on a relatively small parcel of land.

The surrounding land with plenty of rocks, clay soil, and poor drainage was hardly a farmer’s dream – but farm they did. However, practicing the ancient slash-and-burn agriculture quickly exhausts the soil, and within a few centuries it became difficult to feed the population on the limited amount of land available.

Around 4700 BC, these farmers began to build giant stone structures.⁴As we see time and again, the building of these structures didn’t happen at just any time. In each location it occurred only after there had been full time farming for centuries. Slash-and-burn agriculture of quickly exhausts the soil, and food production falters. As early as 1976, Colin Renfrew argued that the megaliths in the Locmariaquer area were built in response to this pressure.

Table 1 shows the sequence of the first appearance of agriculture, compared with the first appearance of dolmens or rock chambers, at various locations in Europe.⁵

Megalith means ‘large stone’ in Ancient Greek, and France was the place where the ‘Megalithic Age’ began. In fact, when measured by sheer volume and tonnage, far more megalith building occured here than anywhere else in Europe.

And from then on the society of Carnac, as this place is today known, flourished. Its chronology here has long been established. However, in recent decades two highly unusual individuals (one Belgian, one English) have revolutionized our understanding of the likely purpose of these, the world’s very first megaliths.

The earliest creations were single tall stones, which we call by the French term menhir (Fig. 40). They were erected at certain sites and frequently decorated with agricultural images such as oxen, plows, and the stone axes that Neolithic farmers employed to cut down trees for fields.

Some of the menhirs were immense. The champion, Le Gran Menhir Brise, which is now broken in two, stood an awe-inspiring 67 feet and weighed over 80 tons. It has been estimated that it took a minimum of 3,800 adults to hoist it into place, and this would have meant the co-operation of numerous separate communities (Fig. 41). An entire complex of such decorated menhirs were erected on the Locmariaquer peninsula.⁶

It has been assumed that the menhirs were ceremonial, symbolic structures, probably with religious associations. At Le Manio, a decorated menhir had numerous ceremonial axes deposited at its base, suggesting a link between ax exchange and megalithic ritual from the earliest stage.⁷This link of megaliths and stone axes became endemic in following years, and stone axes from all over France began streaming into the area.

Mereaux, however, believe that the axes were used as symbols of fertility. He also says that the menhirs are known to attract lightning. This is not surprising, because at the base of these giant stones he measured negatively charged electric ground currents that interacted with the positive atmospheric electric field. Again, we see a familiar pattern of natural energies, combined with fertility.

Skeletons have been found in these passage graves, and an individual grave would be used for several centuries. Yet in all that time, only two or three dozen individuals might be buried there. In other cases, such as the largest of all passage graves, Newgrange, or Sí an Bhrú, in Ireland, only five or six burials took place.

An entire region might contain just a few of these passage graves, and this scarcity has caused some archaeologists to argue that the primary usage of ‘passage graves’ was not at all as graves. Rather, the burial aspect seems to have been a ceremonial part of some more important function. What bones are found were usually brought there and burned.

English expert Colin Burgess explains⁹, “It is strange that no tomb was ever filled with human remains to anything like its capacity, not even the Irish passage graves where considerable accumulations of burnt bone are common. It is likely that the burials at these sites were part of a much wider range of ceremonial and ritual functions, and that they were certainly not intended to act as charnel houses for successive burials.”

Ian Kinnes of the British Museum in London adds¹⁰, “It was always rather blithely assumed that their function was for burial. Now there’s an increasing feeling that this may be only one aspect, and perhaps in some instances only a minor aspect, of very complex rituals which reflect the preoccupations of an early farming society facing a new environment.”

As we have seen in the Americas, skeletons and skulls were often associated with regeneration and rebirth. In Mexico, for example, human bones were “regarded as the seat of the essential life force and the metaphorical seed from which the individual, whether human, animal, or plant, is reborn…”¹¹

In certain parts of Africa, a planter would dig up an ancestor and bring his skeletal hand to the field during planting season. As late as the early 20th Century, farmers in Finland would borrow bones from the cemetery to place along the edges of their field while plowing, then return them later in the year. In Hungary, dirt from a fresh grave sprinkled on your field was always considered beneficial.

The linkage of bones, the dead, and agricultural fertility is an extremely long-standing tradition throughout the World. In Anatolia, Turkey, at Catal Huyuk, the world’s first farming culture c. 6200 BC, the art is dominated by combined images of death and fertility.¹²

Pierre Mereaux brought his own magnetic gradiometer and ground electrodes to bear on a dozen passage graves and rock chambers. Setting the magnetometer on its tripod atop the capstones, he found that the needle of the meter often “danced all day” on a chamber, but remained quite steady in the adjacent fields. His magnetometer worked a bit differently than ours. It would register changes in the strength of the vertical component of the magnetic field, but not absolute strength. Ours measures absolute strength, but is not as sensitive as Mereaux’s.

Yet, time and again his readings coincide with what we have obtained at numerous locations. Mereaux also measured the electric ground currents inside and outside chambers. The current was always many times stronger inside.

Mereaux is not the only revolutionary to shed new light on archaeological assumptions regarding Carnac. In the past 20 years, in fact, a mutiny of sorts has begun within the conservative confines of French archaeology. Cast in the role of leader of these mutineers is an Englishman: Dr. Mark Patton. As curator of the archaeological museum on the Island of Jersey, he has spent nearly two decades excavating these structures, and some of his finds have surprised the academic world.

Formerly, it was always assumed that the huge menhirs were erected for ceremonial, even religious, purposes. Thus, one would expect them to be accorded great respect. In 1984, however, while excavating the geometrically decorated megalithic site at Gavrinis, French archaeologist Charles-Tanguy Le Roux discovered that the carvings on one of the giant stone slabs, used in the ceiling, exactly matched those on the capstone of Locmariaquer’s famous Grand Tumulus La Table des Marchands. But as subsequent investigation revealed, even the Grand Tumulus was not the original source of this stone. Both slabs had come from the same original block that once stood in the ground as a decorated menhir.

More recent excavations provide clear evidence that earlier menhirs, and even the more recent Grand Tumulus structures, were regularly uprooted, broken up, and re-used in later megalithic structures.¹³

As we noted earlier, the peoples of the Americas blended the spiritual, ceremonial, and practical, especially in the vital area of fertility. If the later structures had a primarily practical value, with each model being superseded by a better model, it makes very good sense indeed to re-use material from the older structures. It would not be unlike stripping boards off an abandoned building to erect a new one.

When arguing for a strictly religious or ceremonial purpose behind the massive effort needed to build these structures, people often use the comparison of the volunteer craftsmen who erected the European cathedrals in the Middle Ages. These were people moved by religious passion, they say, and they required no pay for their labors.

However, this argument ignores important differences. The craftsmen of Paris who erected Notre Dame, constituted less than one percent of the population of the city. Many, perhaps most, were in fact paid. The volunteers probably worked on the cathedral in their spare time.

By contrast, many great megalithic structures had to involve 20% of the population, many of them full time, for years, or part time for decades – even centuries. Neolithic society made far more of an investment per capita in building the ancient structures than did any Medieval European city in creating even the most impressive cathedrals.

Furthermore, the Neolithic structures were usually built at a time of desperation. The Notre Dames of the world were products of affluence that could spare whole segments of the population for non-food related activity. The situations are simply not comparable.

Patton provides impressive evidence that the changes in megaliths were part of a change in Neolithic social structure. He believes that the tribal elders in France were “replaced by a new elite, whose status depended more on accumulated wealth than on ancestral lineage”.¹⁴

If so, where did the wealth come from, and what was the connection between wealth and megalith building?

A part of the Mourbihan Peninsula has a good amount of magnetite in the ground and, accordingly, is littered with magnetic anomalies. The readings we have discussed in previous chapters average 300 to 500 gamma differences from their surroundings. At Carnac, Mereaux’s readings ranged from minus 400 gammas to plus 1,100 gammas.

The Locmariaquer peninsula is also the most seismically active region of France, surrounded by 31 faults. Fig. 42 shows that at least four of the major megaliths lie in a straight line precisely on top of one of the invisible faults.¹⁵

Seismic stresses can cause electrical currents in the ground by two different mechanisms. The most familiar one, which is limited to quartz, is called the piezo-electric effect. It has long been known that quartz placed under pressure develops electric charge, and this area of France is plentiful in quartz.

A second mechanism has been discovered in recent years. Almost any kind of rock, if placed under enough pressure to fracture will emit electric current just before fracturing. This may be the primary cause of newly discovered electric and magnetic signals preceding earthquakes.¹⁶

The mysterious balls of light rising out of the ground, which frequently precede quakes, have been thought to arise from the crushing of rock under stress. In labs, this breakage has produced similar light balls, even in non-quartz rocks.¹⁷ In a prelude to an earthquake in Quebec, basketball size globes of light were seen emerging right through the asphalt of a parking lot.

Armorican geology also produces numerous variances in the strength of the local gravitational field near Carnac. Fig. 43 shows how the major stone structures built here align with these zones of disturbance.¹⁸ The three dotted lines show the borders of the areas disturbed in these ways. Outside the lines, readings are uniform. Inside, they vary widely. There is one frontier where the edges of all three zones come together. And right here, where Mereaux found that the edges of the magnetically, seismically, and gravitationally disturbed zones meet, the ancients erected the most fantastic stone rows in the world.

When dealing with electromagnetic forces of the earth, experience shows that the strongest effects usually occur at the edge of the disturbed zone (not at its center). On a similar border, the ancient American metropolis of Cahokia was built (see Chapter 7). The discontinuity of a gradient seems more important than being where the forces are strongest. At the edge of such discontinuities in electrical conductivity, extreme instabilities in the vertical component of the local geomagnetic field occur,¹⁹ inducing electric currents. Mereaux measured both simultaneously at Carnac.

In all Grand Tumulus structures, blocks of granite were piled atop one another to massive proportions, sometimes to the height of a 5-story building. Table 2 shows the dimensions of six tumuli.²⁰

Enormous though they were, these structures covered chambers no bigger than your average modern bedroom – 7-13 feet long by 3-10 feet wide and perhaps 7 feet tall (the same height as American rock chambers). They were not corbelled, always rectangular in shape, and would sometimes have subsidiary structures like side niches and cysts in the floor. With the exception of the St. Michel Tumulus, there was only one chamber in each.

They were not built as graves. At St. Michel, 21 stone ‘burial chambers’ were found, but in many only the skeletons of young girls were interred – the favorite sacrifice of planting societies. Other chambers only contained skeletons of small cows.²¹ Perhaps the megaliths here were not erected for corpses, but rather the corpses were interred for the megaliths.

So what was their primary purpose? When we look for clues to this puzzle, we see that the tumuli were always made of granite, having a magnetite content ranging between 4 and 30%.²²

Granite is the most common radioactive mineral, although the radioactivity is extremely low-level. But walk into any hardware store in New Hampshire, the Granite State, and the home radon detector is always prominently displayed. Every house made of granite needs one. Radon gas is radioactive and constantly emitted by granite. Actual radiated neutrons are also produced by this common mineral. If you live in such an area, you are supposed to always keep a window slightly open. As long as air circulates you will be safe. But when the indoor air is so enclosed as to no longer circulate, radon gas can build up to levels that are believed to produce cancer over time. Geiger counters chatter away in such homes.

With the Grand Tumulus design, we have a small mountain of granite enclosing particularly small air spaces. The airspace has no windows and is only connected to the outside atmosphere by a long tunnel. This design practically eliminates air circulation within. Radiation and radon gas both do one thing extremely well – create ions. The air within the chamber of a Grand Tumulus should be highly ionized on all but the windiest of days.

In addition, the usual energies selected in the siting of passage graves were also sought out. As shown in Fig. 42, Mane Lud lies astride a hidden fault near the tip of the Locmariaquer peninsula, the home of the original menhirs. The tumuli St. Michel and Le Moustoir both flank the multiple-energy frontier zone, on which the alignments lie.²³

A Grand Tumulus should have acted like a giant, particularly intense version of our New England rock chambers. So, quite possibly, these tumuli were used as giant seed treatment chambers.

 Stone rows

Sto axes found in the area indicate that people were coming from all over western Europe to patronize these structures. So demand may well have been outstripping supply. Seed treatment on a massive scale, though, may have been made possible with the arrival of the stone rows.

Containing 11,000 rocks, the stone rows on the Mourbihan Peninsula were the most massive of these rows ever erected anywhere on the planet. The stones, weighing several tons apiece, were stuck upright in the ground to form long lines that would often converge on stone semi-circles.²⁴

Just like at Avebury in England (Chapter 9), the menhirs alternate between a lozenge-shaped ‘female’ stone and a pillar-like ‘male’ stone.²⁵

Going from east to west along the boundary of the zone of disturbance, the Field of Menec runs east by northeast for 3,828 feet, with an average width of 330 feet, the length of ten football fields and twice as wide! Here, eleven lines contain 1,099 menhirs, mounted vertically in the ground. At the end of these lines there seems to have originally been a semi-circle of standing stones, called a cromlech. The stones begin at about two feet in height and continually increase in size towards the cromlech, topping out at 13 feet tall. This pattern is also found at Avebury Henge, and, as we shall see in Chapter 9, there is a very good physical reason for doing it.

The Field of Kermario begins 1,100 feet after the Field of Menec ends. It runs for 3,674 feet and averages 330 feet wide. 982 menhirs are placed in 10 lines, ranging from 1.6 feet to 21 feet high. Here, too, the stones gradually increase in size towards the end.

The Field of Kerlescan begins 1,300 feet later, has a length of 2,886 feet and an average width of 456 feet. Its 13 lines run due east, totaling 540 stones that range from 2.6 feet to 13 feet high. In each of these three fields, the stone rows are only approximately parallel, but converge gradually as they approach the cromlech.²⁶

One cannot escape the striking similarities in scale and numbers of these three fields. They become all the more thought provoking when you look at Fig. 43, where all three fields parallel the remarkable convergence of seismic, gravitational, and magnetic frontiers.

As we are about to see, the physics of these stone rows is indisputable. In fact, you can test it yourself in a small backyard experiment. 20th Century physicists used the same principles to build enormous structures, called super-colliders. (More on this in the next chapter.)