From Atlantis to the Sphinx Read Free Page A

basically realistic film instead of the usual scenario with Greek temples, white bearded priests, and beautiful blondes wearing togas like linen bathrobes. And once again, I shelved the problem of ‘Atlantis’ in favour of other projects.
    It was almost two years later, in the autumn of 1993, that I was approached by an old friend, Geoffrey Chessler, who had commissioned one of my earlier books, Starseekers. He was now working for a publisher who specialised in illustrated books on ‘occult’ subjects—like Nostradamus—and who wanted to know if I might have some suitable suggestion. My mind was a blank, but since I expected to be passing through London a few days later, I agreed to meet him for dinner at a mutually convenient spot, which happened to be a hotel at Gatwick airport. There we exchanged various ideas and possibilities, and I casually mentioned my interest in the Sphinx. Geoffrey was immediately interested, and as I expanded my ideas—how it seemed to me that Hapgood’s ‘lost civilisation’ would probably have a totally different mode of thinking from that of modern man—suggested that I should write him an outline of a book about it.
    Now I should explain that, in the late 1960s, I had been asked by an American publisher to write a book about ‘the occult’. The subject had always interested me, but I was inclined to take it with a pinch of salt. When I asked the advice of the poet Robert Graves about it, his answer was ‘Don’t’. Yet it was in Graves’s own White Goddess that I found a basic distinction that served as a foundation for the book—between what he called ‘solar knowledge’ and ‘lunar knowledge’. Our modern type of knowledge—rational knowledge—is solar; it operates with words and concepts, and it fragments the object of knowledge with dissection and analysis. Graves argues that the knowledge system of ancient civilisations is based upon intuition, which grasps things as a whole.
    In a story called ‘The Abominable Mr Gunn’, Graves offers a practical example. When he was at school, a fellow pupil named Smilley was able to solve complex mathematical problems merely by looking at them. Asked by the master—Mr Gunn—how he did this, he replied: ‘It just came to me.’ Mr Gunn disbelieved him; he thought he had simply looked up the answers in the back of the book. When Smilley replied that the answer got two of the figures wrong, Mr Gunn sent him to be caned. And he forced him to do his sums ‘the normal way’ until Smilley lost his strange ability.
    Now it could be objected that Smilley was merely a freak, a prodigy with a mind like a computer. But this explanation will not suffice. There are certain numbers called primes, which cannot be divided exactly by any other number—7, 13 and 17 are examples. But there is no simple mathematical method of finding out whether a large number is a prime, except by painfully dividing every smaller number into it. Even the most powerful computer has to do it this way. Yet in the nineteenth century, a calculating prodigy was asked whether some vast ten-digit number was a prime, and replied after a moment's thought: ‘No, it can be divided by 241.’
    Oliver Sacks has described two mentally subnormal twins in a New York asylum who can sit swapping twenty-figure primes. Scientifically speaking —that is, according to our system of rational ‘solar knowledge’—it cannot be done. Yet calculating prodigies do it. It is as if their minds hover like a bird above the whole number field, and see the answer.
    This can mean only one thing: that although our solar knowledge system seems to us comprehensive and all-sufficient, there must be some other means of obtaining knowledge that achieves its results in a completely different way. The idea is baffling—like trying to imagine another dimension apart from length, breadth and height. We know that modern physics posits other dimensions, yet our minds are incapable of conceiving them.