The Atlantis Blueprint by Colin Wilson

the one before it, the answer gets closer and closer to the Golden Number 0.618034… the bigger the numbers concerned. No matter how big the numbers become – even billions or trillions – the number never quite reaches the Golden Number.
    These Fibonacci numbers can be found in pine cones, nautilus shells and spiral nebulae.
    This is what excited Schwaller so much when he detected it in the Luxor temple. He had spent his years in Switzerland studying the laws of universal harmony, as epitomised in cathedrals such as Chartres. His results had been stolen by an alchemist called Fulcanelli, who had published them as his own in 1925 in a book called
The Mystery of Cathedrals,
13 which quickly became a classic. Schwaller had no doubt that this law of harmony was a part of a far older tradition that was already well established by the time of ancient Egypt. When his first results were published in 1949 in
The Temple in Man,
they caused an intellectual furore of the kind that the French enjoy so much, and Schwaller became briefly as famous as contemporaries like Sartre and Camus. (It did not last – the public soon tired of Egyptian geometry.)
    Schwaller believed that this tradition predated ancient Egypt because during his first visit to the Sphinx he had no doubt whatever that it had not been eroded by wind-blown sand, but by water. This suggested that it dated back long before 2,500 BC, the usual date assigned to the pyramids of Giza. Schwaller was familiar with an occult tradition that the Sphinx was not built by ancient Egyptians, but by survivors from the civilisation of Atlantis, who had fled some time before the final catastrophe. In his last book,
Sacred Science,
14he spoke of an Atlantean race, ‘ancient vestiges of which have now been determined in western Africa; a wave of these people, having crossed Saharan Africa, finally settled in the valley of the Nile’. The true date of the construction of the Sphinx must be some time around 10,000 BC.
    Schwaller died at Grasse in 1961, at the age of seventy-four. Although his books soon went out of print, a copy of
Sacred Science
fell into the hands of a student of Egyptology called John Anthony West. West was convinced that it was absurd to believe that ancient Egypt had come into being about 3,100 BC – the date accepted by most Egyptologists – and that a mere five centuries later it was already building the pyramids. That, he felt, would be like asking us to believe that Europeans had no civilisation until five centuries before Chartres Cathedral. The more West learned of Egyptian science, medicine, mathematics and astronomy, the more it seemed to him obvious that Egyptian civilisation was far, far older than Egyptologists usually believe.
    As he read
Sacred Science,
he realised there might be a simple way to prove this. If the Sphinx and its enclosure had been eroded by rain, not by wind-blown sand, a good geologist ought to be able to tell at a glance. He discussed the problem in a strange book called
Serpent in the Sky15
– strange because it spends most of its time discussing Schwaller de Lubicz, Egyptian geometry and the Golden Section. The book was sent to me for review in July 1979, and I was naturally most impressed by its final chapter, ‘Egypt: Heir to Atlantis’, with its photographs comparing the Sphinx enclosure with the cliff face behind the temple of Queen Hatshepsut, with erosion in both places that geologists agree to be water weathering. To me they certainly looked remarkably similar.
    It took West many years to find an open-minded geologist who could command the respect of his colleagues. Eventually, accompanied by Boston University geologist Robert Schoch, West made the trip to Cairo. As they stood before the Sphinx enclosure, he was understandably nervous, half expecting
    Schoch to point out that he had made some elementary error and that the erosion
was
caused by sand. To his relief, Schoch took one look and agreed that this was water