The Ancient Stones Speak [antikvár]

Preface Ancient stone giants, the monumental legacy of the modern world's long-dead ancestors, speak to us today. And, though they are silent, we can hear them, if we make use of all the resources (old as well as radically new) available to us for tuning them in. These structures of massive stone are found all over the world — often at places of intense seismic activity — in locations which, after thousands of years of occupation by changing cultures with changing beliefs, continue to evoke in those who visit them some instinct for the sacred. The megalithic sites of the world raise unsettling questions with respect to the generally accepted version of human prehistory. They suggest a past marked by a mobility and by an intellectual and technological sophistication that approaches or even equals our own. By demonstrating Early Man's intense sense of harmony with his environment, these sites also indicate valuable lines of thought for the world today which seems to be standing oh the brink of self-extinction. The sites still evoke what we have called a sense of the sacred — what others might describe as a heightened consciousness. It may be a bit too simple to explain the occupation of these sites over thousands of years by a succession of cultures with distinct beliefs as being merely the result of habit or convenience — the repeated use of a developed site and available structures. Could not the continued occupancy suggest a once powerful, but now only vestigial, sensitivity on the part of human beings to the earth-energies given off at the sites themselves? Many of the shes are situated in a definite pattern on the surface of the planet. They exhibit a surprising level of astronomical, mathematical, and geophysical information. And, in their structures, they reveal common engineering strategies to deal with earthquakes. The evidence presented by the megalithic sites described in The Ancient Stones Speak suggests a worldwide response to catastrophic changes in the earth's crust. But, at the same time, these cultures are spread over a considerable time-span, and they are widely separated geographically. These facts would argue against a single worldwide culture — unless the local cultures known today at each site are actually built over various centers of an earlier, single worldwide cukure which is flow unknown. There is no archaeological evidence presently available to support the idea of such a culture — unless the stonework of megalithic structures like the Great Pyramid, Tiahuanaco, and Stonehenge is much older than now generally believed. The evidence hints at a previously unsuspected awareness in prehistoric times of then-approaching cataclysmic events caused by the planet's geological evolution. Such violence, associated with the ice ages, has been periodic in the earth's history. From 53,000 B.C. to 48,000 B.C. the earth's north magnetic pole shifted from the Greenland Sea to Hudson Bay. Evidence of the violence which swept the surface of the earth at that time was found in Siberia in 1901 when the still-frozen carcass of a mammoth was discovered at Bere-sovka. The beast died sometime between 45,000 B.C. and 37,000 B.C. while feeding on buttercups and other summer vegetation. Its body was flash-frozen, not to thaw again until 1901. Such a thing could have been brought about only by stupendous and overwhelming geological and metereological events. There are indications that we may be returning to a period of increasing planetary instability with increasing earthquakes and volcanic activity. The strength of the geomagnetic field appears to be diminishing as we move toward the next reversal of the earth's magnetic poles (predicted by J.M. Harwood and S.R.C. Malin for 2030 A.D.). Past field reversals of the planet have correlated with the extinction of various forms of life (possibly a result of increased cosmic radiation), the onset of ice ages, volcanism, and earthquakes. (This last has increased so much in recent years that much effort is now being made to improve earthquake prediction.) People who are shortsighted enough to build major structures on an important active plate boundary like the San Andreas fault-line certainly need more information. My approach to deahng with the many questions and lines of thought