The World of T.C.Lethbridge

© Brian R. Greene 2004 [1]

In 1919, Einstein received a paper that could easily have been dismissed as the ravings of a crank. It was written by a little-known German mathematician named Theodor Kaluza, and in a few brief pages it laid out an approach for unifying the two forces known at the time, gravity and electromagnetism.

To achieve this goal, Kaluza proposed a radical departure from something so basic, so completely taken for granted, that it seemed beyond questioning. He proposed that the universe does not have three space dimensions. Instead, Kaluza asked Einstein and the rest of the physics community to entertain the possibility that the universe has four space dimensions so that, together with time, it has a total of five space-time dimensions.

Kaluza proposed that in addition to left/right, back/forth, and up/down, the universe actually has one more spatial dimension that, for some reason, no one has ever seen. If correct, this would mean that there is another independent direction in which things can move, and therefore that we need to give four pieces of information to specify a precise location in space, and a total of five pieces of information if we also specify a time.

Kaluza realized that the equations of Einstein’s general theory of relativity could fairly easily be extended mathematically to a universe that had one more space dimension. Kaluza undertook this extension and found, naturally enough, that the higher-dimensional version of general relativity not only included Einstein’s original gravity equation but, because of the extra space dimension, also had extra equations.

When Kaluza studied these extra equations, he discovered something extraordinary: the extra equations were none other than the equations Maxwell had discovered in the nineteenth century for describing the electromagnetic field! By imagining a universe with one new space dimension, Kaluza had proposed a solution to what Einstein viewed as one of the most important problems in all physics. Kaluza had found a framework that combined Einstein’s original equations of general relativity with those of Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism.

Then, in 1926, the Swedish physicist Oskar Klein injected a new twist into Kaluza’s idea, one that suggested where the extra dimension might be hiding. Klein’s contribution was to suggest that what’s true for an object within the universe might be true for the fabric of the universe itself. Namely, just as the tightrope’s surface has both large and small dimensions, so does the fabric of space.

Maybe the three dimensions we all know about - left/right, back/forth, and up/down - are like the horizontal extent of the tightrope, dimensions of the big, easy-to-see variety. But just as the surface of the tightrope has an additional, small, curled-up, circular dimension, maybe the fabric of space also has a small, curled-up, circular dimension, one so small that no one has powerful enough magnifying equipment to reveal its existence. Because of its tiny size, Klein argued, the dimension would be hidden.

With this modification to Kaluza’s original idea, Klein provided an answer to how the universe might have more than the three dimensions of common experience that could remain hidden, a framework that has since become known as Kaluza-Klein theory. And since an extra dimension of space was all Kaluza needed to merge general relativity and electromagnetism, Kaluza-Klein theory would seem to be just what Einstein was looking for.

Indeed Einstein and many others became quite excited about unification through a new, hidden space dimension, and a vigorous effort was launched to see whether this approach would work in complete detail. Einstein continued to dabble in the Kaluza-Klein theory until at least the early 1940s. But the theory encountered difficulties in trying to describe the microworld, and in particular the incorporation of the electron into the extra-dimensional picture.

There was another reason scientists were hesitant about the approach. Many found it both arbitrary and extravagant to postulate a hidden spatial dimension. If you asked Kaluza and Klein why the universe had five spacetime dimensions rather than four, or six, or seven, or 7,000 for that matter, they wouldn’t have had an answer much more convincing than “Why not?”

More than three decades later, the situation changed radically with the advent of string theory, [2] the first approach to merge general relativity and quantum mechanics, with the potential to unify our understanding of all forces and all matter. But the quantum mechanical equations of string theory don’t work in four spacetime dimensions, nor in five, six or seven, or 7000. Instead, the equations of string theory work only in ten spacetime dimensions - nine of space, plus time. String theory demands more dimensions.

Prior to string theory, no theory said anything at all about the number of spatial dimensions in the universe. Every theory from Newton to Maxwell to Einstein assumed that the universe had three space dimensions, much as we all assume the sun will rise tomorrow. Kaluza and Klein proffered a challenge by suggesting that there were four space dimensions, but this amounted to yet another assumption - a different assumption, but an assumption nonetheless.

Now, for the first time, string theory provided equations that predicted the number of space dimensions. A calculation - not an assumption, not a hypothesis, not an inspired guess - determines the number of space dimensions according to string theory, and the surprising thing is that the calculated number is not three but nine. String theory leads us, inevitably, to a universe with six extra space dimensions and hence provides a compelling, ready-made context for invoking the ideas of Kaluza and Klein. Their original proposal assumed only one hidden dimension, but it’s easily generalized to two, three, or even six extra dimensions required by string theory.

However, there’s an awkward detail regarding string theory. Over the last three decades, not one but five distinct versions of string theory have been developed. While their names are not of the essence, they are called Type 1, Type IIA, Type IIB, Heterotic-O, and Heterotic-E, and they all share the same essential features; the basic ingredients are strands of vibrating energy - and as calculations in the 1970s and 1980s revealed, each theory requires six extra space dimensions; but when they are analyzed in detail, significant differences appear.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, with many physicists hotly pursuing an understanding of one or another of the string theories, the enigma of the five versions was not a problem researchers typically dealt with on a day-to-day basis. Instead, it was one of those quiet questions that everyone assumed would be addressed in the distant future, when the understanding of each individual string theory had become significantly more refined.

But in the summer of 1995, with little warning, these modest hopes were wildly exceeded when Edward Witten - who for two decades has been the world’s most renowned string theorist - uncovered a hidden unity that tied all five string theories together. Witten showed that rather than being distinct, the five theories are actually just five different ways of mathematically analyzing a single theory. The unifying master theory has tentatively been called M-theory.

Witten’s work revealed that the approximate string theory equations, used in the 1970s and 1980s to conclude that the universe must have nine space dimensions, missed the true number by one. The exact answer, his analysis showed, is that the universe according to M-theory has ten space dimensions, that is eleven spacetime dimensions. [3]

Much as Kaluza found that a universe with five spacetime dimensions provided a framework for unifying electromagnetism and gravity, and much as string theorists found that a universe with ten spacetime dimensions provided a framework for unifying quantum mechanics and general relativity, Witten found that a universe with eleven spacetime dimensions provided a framework for unifying all string theories.

Following Witten’s paper, the avalanche of subsequent results led to the realization that string theory, and the M-theoretic framework to which it now belongs, contains ingredients besides strings. The analyses showed that there are two-dimensional objects called, naturally enough, membranes or - in deference to systematically naming their higher-dimensional cousins - two-branes.

There are objects with three spatial dimensions called three-branes. And, although increasingly difficult to visualize, the analyses showed that there are also objects with p spatial dimensions, where p can be any whole number less than 10, known - with no derogation intended - as p-branes. Thus strings are but one ingredient in string theory, not the ingredient.

This raises an intriguing possibility. Might we, right now, be living within a three-brane? Like Snow White, whose world exists within a two-dimensional movie screen - a two-brane - that itself resides within a higher-dimensional universe (the three space dimensions of the movie theatre), might everything we know exist within a three- dimensional screen - a three-brane - that itself resides within the higher-dimensional universe of string/M-theory?

Could it be that what Newton, Leibniz, Mach, and Einstein called three-dimensional space is actually a particular three-dimensional entity in string/M-theory? Or, in a more relativistic language, could it be that the four-dimensional spacetime developed by Minkowski and Einstein is actually the wake of a three-brane as it evolves through time? In short might the universe as we know it be a brane? The possibility that we are living within a three-brane - the so-called braneworld scenario - is the latest twist in string/M-theory’s story.

If we are living within a three-brane - if our four-dimensional spacetime is nothing but the history swept out by a three-brane through time - then the venerable question of whether spacetime is a something would be cast in a brilliant new light. Familiar four-dimensional spacetime would arise from a real physical entity in string/M-theory, a three-brane, not from some vague or abstract idea.

In this approach, the reality of our four-dimensional spacetime would be on a par with the reality of an electron or a quark. [4] But if the universe we’re aware of really is a three-bane, wouldn’t even a casual glance reveal that we are immersed within something - within the three-brane interior?

Well, we’ve already learned of things within which modern physics suggest we may be immersed - a Higgs ocean; space filled with dark energy; myriad quantum field fluctuations - none of which make themselves directly apparent to unaided perceptions. So it shouldn’t be a shock to learn that string/M-theory adds another candidate to the list of invisible things that may fill ‘empty’ space. But let’s not get cavalier.

For each of the previous possibilities, we understand its impact on physics and how we might establish that it truly exists. Indeed, for two of the three - dark energy and quantum fluctuations - we’ve seen that strong evidence supporting their existence has already been gathered; and evidence for the Higgs field is being sought at current and future accelerators. So what is the corresponding situation for life within a three-brane? If the brane-world scenario is correct, why don’t we see the three-brane, and how would we establish that it exists?

The answer highlights how the physical implications of string/M-theory in the braneworld context differ radically from the earlier ‘branefree’ (or, as they’re sometimes affectionately called ‘no-braner’) scenarios. Consider, as an important example, the motion of light - the motion of photons. In string theory, a photon is a particular string vibrational pattern. More specifically, mathematical studies have shown that in the braneworld scenario, only open string vibrations, not closed ones, produce photons, and this makes a big difference.

Open string end-points are constrained to move within the three-brane, but are otherwise completely free. This implies that photons (open strings executing the photon mode of vibration) would travel without any constraint or obstruction throughout our three-brane. And that would make the brane appear completely transparent - completely invisible - thus preventing us from seeing that we are immersed within it.

That’s an intense realization with important consequences. Earlier, we required the extra dimensions of string/M-theory to be tightly curled up. The reason, clearly, is that we don’t see the extra dimensions and so they must be hidden away. And one way to hide them is to make them smaller than we or our equipment can detect.

But let’s now examine the issue in the braneworld scenario. How do we detect things? Well, when we use our eyes, we use the electromagnetic force; when we use powerful instruments like electron microscopes, we also use the electromagnetic force; when we use atom smashers, one of the forces we use to probe the ultrasmall is, once again, the electromagnetic force.

But if the electromagnetic force is confined to our three-brane, our three space dimensions, it is unable to probe the extra dimensions, regardless of their size. Photons cannot escape our dimensions, enter the extra dimensions, and then travel back to our eyes or equipment allowing us to detect the extra dimensions, even if they were as large as the familiar space dimensions.

So, if we live in a three-bane, there is an alternative explanation for why we’re not aware of the extra dimensions. It is not necessarily that the extra dimensions are extremely small. They could be big. We don’t see them because of the way we see. We see by using the electromagnetic force, which is unable to access any dimensions beyond the three we know about. Like an ant walking along a lily pad, completely unaware of the deep waters lying just beneath the visible surface, we could be floating within a grand, expansive, higher-dimensional space, but the electromagnetic force - eternally trapped within our dimensions - would be unable to reveal this.

Okay, you might say. But the electromagnetic force is only one of nature’s four forces. What about the other three? Can they probe into the extra dimensions, thus enabling us to reveal their existence? For the strong and the weak nuclear forces, the answer is, again, no. In the braneworld scenario, calculations show that the messenger particles for these forces - gluons and W and Z particles - also arise from open-string vibrational patterns, so they are just as trapped as photons, and processes involving the strong and weak nuclear forces are just as blind to the extra dimensions.

The same goes for particles of matter. Electrons, quarks, and all the other particle species also arise from the vibrations of open strings with trapped endpoints. Thus, in the braneworld scenario, you and I and everything we’ve ever seen are permanently imprisoned within our three-brane. Taking account of time, everything is trapped within our four-dimensional slice of spacetime.

Well, almost everything. For the force of gravity, the situation is different. Mathematical analyses of the braneworld scenario have shown that gravitons arise from the vibrational pattern of closed strings, much as they do in the previously discussed no-braner scenario. And closed strings - strings with no endpoints - are not trapped by branes. They are as free to leave a brane as they are to roam on through it.

So, if we were living in a brane, we would not be completely cut off from the extra dimensions. Through the gravitational force, we could both influence and be influenced by the extra dimensions. Gravity, in such a scenario, would provide our sole means for interacting beyond our three space dimensions.

How big could the extra dimensions be before we’d become aware of them through the gravitational force? Hundreds of years of experiments have confirmed that gravity varies inversely with the square of distance, giving strong evidence that there are three space dimensions. But as of 1998, no experiment had ever probed gravity’s strength on separations smaller than a millimetre.

This led to the proposal that in the braneworld scenario extra dimensions could be as large as a millimetre and would still have been undetected. This radical suggestion inspired a number of experimental groups to initiate a study of gravity at submillimeter distance in hopes of finding violations of the inverse square law; so far, none have been found, down to a tenth of a millimetre. Thus, even with today’s state-or-the-art gravity experiments, if we are living within a three-brane, the extra dimensions could be as large as a tenth of a millimetre, and yet we wouldn’t know it.

This is one of the most striking realizations of the last decade. Using the three nongravitational forces, we can probe down to about a billionth of a billionth (10^-18) of a metre, and no one has found any evidence of extra dimensions. [5]

But in the braneworld scenario, the nongravitational forces are impotent in searching for extra dimensions since they are trapped on the brane itself. Only gravity can give insight into the nature of the extra dimensions, and, as of today, the extra dimensions could be as thick as a human hair and yet they’d be completely invisible to our most sophisticated instruments.

Right now, right next to you, right next to me, and right next to everyone else, there could be another spatial dimension - a dimension beyond left/right, back/forth, and up/down, a dimension that’s curled up but still large enough to swallow something as thick as this page - that remains beyond our grasp [6]

Over the last century, [7] we’ve become intimately acquainted with some previously hidden features of space and time through Einstein’s two theories of relativity and through quantum mechanics. The slowing of time, the relativity of simultaneity, alternative slicings of spacetime, gravity as the warping and curving of space and time, the probabilistic nature of reality, and long-range quantum entanglement were not on the list of things that even the best of the world’s nineteenth century physicists would have expected to find just around the corner. And yet there they were, as attested to by both experimental results and theoretical explanations.

In our age, we’ve come upon our own panoply of unexpected ideas. Dark matter and dark energy that appear to be, far and away, the dominant constituents of the universe. Gravitational waves - ripples in the fabric of spacetime - which were predicted by Einstein’s relativity and may one day allow us to peek further back in time than ever before. A Higgs ocean, which permeates all of space and which, if confirmed, will help us to understand how particles acquire mass. Inflationary expansion, which may explain the shape of the cosmos, resolve the puzzle of why it’s so uniform on large scales, and set the direction to time’s arrow.

String theory, which posits loops and snippets of energy in place of point particles and promises a bold version of Einstein’s dream in which all particles and all forces are combined into a single theory. Extra space dimensions emerging from the mathematics of string theory, and possibly detectable in accelerator experiments during the next decade. A braneworld, in which our three space dimensions may be but one universe among many, floating in a higher-dimensional spacetime. And perhaps even emergent spacetime, in which the very fabric of space and time is composed of more fundamental spaceless and timeless entities.

During the next decade, even more powerful accelerators will provide much needed experimental input, and many physicists are confident that data gathered from the highly energetic collisions that are planned will confirm a number of these pivotal theoretical constructs. I share this enthusiasm and eagerly await the results.

Until our theories make contact with observable, testable phenomena, they remain in limbo - they remain promising collections of ideas that may or may not have relevance for the real world. The new accelerators will advance the overlap between theory and experiment substantially, and, we physicists hope, will usher many of these ideas into the realm of established science.

Endnotes

[1] Source: Chapters 12 & 13 in The Fabric of the Cosmos eene. The published text, from page 360 to 400 in the Penguin 2007 edition, has been compressed by four-fifths to give a flavour of how our everyday ‘three space and one time dimension’ reality is being extended at the leading edge of theoretical physics as new facts about this reality emerge. [Ed]

[2] A string is a one-dimensional vibrating filament of energy, superseding atoms and particles as the smallest unit from which protons, quarks etc. are constituted. Superstring theory incorporates these vibrating strings as one dimensional loops (closed strings) or snippets (open strings) to unite general relativity, quantum mechanics and supersymmetry. [Ed]

[3] Lethbridge was very specific that ‘length’ has a rate of 13⅓-inches and ‘thickness’ a rate of 26⅔. A further 13⅓ would give a rate of 40-inches. Might this be the third space dimension? Lethbridge would have been aware of the significance of this possibility (hence the precision of the thirds), but I am not aware of any mention of this in his published books. Three whorls would be required to give the nine space dimensions of string theory, while a fourth would be needed to accommodate the needs of string/M-theory’s ten space dimensions. Perhaps somebody in London’s Docklands might care to experiment with left/right, back/forth and in/out in one of the atriums in the City of London’s Financial District?[Ed]

[4] You could still ask whether the larger spacetime within which strings and branes exist - the eleven dimensions of string/M-theory - is itself an entity; the reality of the spacetime arena we directly experience, though, would be rendered obvious.

[5] The strings (of string theory) are so small that a direct observation would be tantamount to reading the text on this page from a distance of 100 light years: it would require resolving power nearly a billion billion times finer than our current technology allows.’ Brian Greene in The Fabric of the Cosmos (page 352). [Ed]

[6] There is even a suggestion that gravity itself can be trapped, not by a sticky brane, but by extra dimensions that curve in just the right way, relaxing even further the constraints on their size.

[7] The last five paragraphs have been taken from the final chapter of The Fabric of the Cosmos (page 492 in the Penguin 2007 edition). [Ed]

 

© Tom Lethbridge 1972 [1]

I said before that this investigation was likely to get like a science fiction novel and this is what is happening. We may not be getting satisfactory evidence for flying saucers at an early time, but may we perhaps be getting suggestions that vehicles, resembling more efficient rocket capsules, may have been circling Earth a long time ago and looking for places to land? Is it not possible that the war in heaven may have been a fight between two planets as to which of them should colonize the Earth?

Let us, for our amusement, and not with any sense of conviction, try to draw a picture. A very long time ago, somewhere about 2500 BC perhaps, there were two planets in the solar system rather more advanced technologically than Earth is today. One was Mars, the other perhaps Venus. They communicated with each other yet suffered from the human failing of jealousy.

Mars, let us suppose, set up bases inside the crust of the moon, and began to dispatch rockets carrying partiers of explorers and prospectors to earth. It was during this period of exploration that the primitive Neolithic natives of the earth were persuaded to set up rings of stones and timber circles to act as guiding beacons for the use of incoming spacecraft. All round western Europe from Sardinia to Scandinavia teams were at work and beacons were set up. Perhaps farther east other ways of directing air traffic were devised.

For a relatively short time this reasonably happy state of affairs continued and then the jealousy of the other planet flared up into open war. Probably it also claimed earth as its private possession.

The first campaign in the war centred on the Martian moon base, then there was a slogging match between the two planets themselves. As a result of this, Mars was knocked out and the other planet so badly disabled that it has as yet been unable to take advantage of its victory.

But the interest of all this is in what happened to the exploring parties marooned on Earth by the destruction of the bases on the moon. [2] There was little they could do and after a very short time the Martians had to go native. In the hope, however, that relief expeditions would eventually be sent to fetch them home, they persuaded the real natives to keep up their dances at the stone circles and so on as a religious rite pleasing to the Great Ones in the sky , who had sent them down to live among them and bring them marvellous benefits.

This is a fairy story. I have made it up. But it is curious how it might be true. So much that happened in later history seems to add to the possibility. Let us see what might have happened to the Martians. Remembering that I have been on three Arctic expeditions myself, it is possible that I might have some idea how it all might develop. [3 We will continue our fairy story with some groups of isolated men and perhaps women too, dotted about on the surface of an undeveloped and foreign planet with little hope of ever returning home again; being shipwrecked on a desert island would be far less drastic.

These stranded astronauts would all be specialists in some way or another. If we may judge from modern trends in education, they might be deplorably lacking in simple general knowledge; but some of them must surely have known something about growing things in gardens. This was to be vital in their predicament and may well explain why such and such god is responsible in tradition for teaching a particular people agriculture. Botanists among them would recognize what plants might possibly provide them with grain and would institute an immediate search in the particular part of the world in which they had been stranded. A little was probably known by the natives already.

Much the same thing was likely to happen in the case of metals. There would be men among them skilled in the identification of metallic ores; but there was no fuel to pro vide great heat for smelting. Metal for tools was an urgent necessity and copper was available in many localities. Thus such and such a god became the Smith of the Gods, by teaching the natives how to make simple cupellation hearths. It is interesting to remember in this connection that the earliest metal tools were made of pure copper and only later was tin added to it to make the more satisfactory bronze.

The earliest copper axes and knives found by archaeologists remind me of my childhood’s efforts and are the kind of things which might have been produced by men who knew that copper could be melted from its ores and made into tools, but did not know the technique and had to build it up from their own imagination.

It is hard to see otherwise how metalworking could have been invented by chance. It is perhaps easier to think that some unknown ‘God’ appeared from the sky and taught men how to do it. Easier perhaps, but not very much easier, for you are only pushing it further back on to another world in another age.

There was very little else they could do to better their situation. All the mechanical civilization in which they had been brought up vanished with the failure of their fuel supplies. It was useless to try to build a boat, as many men have done on the loss of their ship, to take them home again, for their home was far away across the heavens and only a relief expedition could take them back.

But to the natives, to whom they had miraculously appeared from the sky, they were still wonderful. For a while they may well have retained some ammunition for firearms of some kind and from this the stories of the power of the gods to strike a man dead in an instant could well have arisen. So too could the idea of Zeus’ thunderbolts have originated in some kind of hand grenade.

As time went on in their isolation from normal life, ‘the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose’. Isn’t this exactly what was bound to happen? In our story too, we must assume that this took place not at the base of one lost expedition, but at several. The exploration parties were often cut off from one another by hundreds or thousands of miles of sea or impassable forest. The world they had come to was young, with none of the roads, towns or vehicles of civilization. Of necessity they must have taken to the sea, in the hope of joining up with others of their kind.

Thus, we may think, there slowly arose on earth little tribes of hybrids with a greater knowledge than others in the world at the time. Unlike the rest, they knew how to provide a subsistence from agriculture, they knew how to make metal tools and they learnt how to use the sea.

But the leaders in each group proudly claimed descent from their forefathers, who had come from the sky. Although this blood was slowly diluted by admixture from the natives; yet when possible they intermarried with those of their own kind and, throughout the old world at any rate, they became the ruling caste.

How much was handed down by word of mouth of the remembered lore of the lost planet is anybody’s guess. Scraps of the knowledge of how to handle bio-electronic power apparently spread to every corner of the globe and large sections of more detailed information remained in such doctrines as that of the Kahuna people in the Pacific.

The most colourful traditional picture of all this fairy tale is undoubtedly that which survives from ancient Greece. Here the myths and legends are just the kind of thing which one might have expected to be found circulating hundreds of years after the astonishing and little-understood happenings.

But, even in the old Celtic tradition, there seems to be traces of similar ideas. There we find cauldrons which revive dead men, magic spears, inexhaustible sources of food and suchlike things which, although clearly imaginary in their context, might yet be reflections of older events of a more concrete nature. Right down to the Viking age, men still wore coats in battle on which swords would not bite and carried unbeatable weapons.

Somehow it all seems too much for the imagination of the early Semitic, Indian and Greek peoples. We know the kind of thing which is imagined by the so-called primitive folk: ‘You must not swim in the sea, or a little worm will swim up inside you and you will have a baby.’

Of course you would not get anything quite so simple from people who watched and hunted wild beasts for their food, or kept them in domesticity for the same purpose. Yet even the hunters on the hill, however much they watch the soaring of the great birds of prey, would surely not have imagined easily gods who flew about the heavens and resembled them so closely; while the agriculturalists hardly bothered with the sky at all, except to watch for signs of coming wind or rain.

But if anything remotely like our fairy story should ever have happened, it appears to have been a mixed blessing. Did we not guess that the strangers came from Mars and was not Mars the planet of war? Why was it thought to be so, unless there was some vague tradition at the back of the idea?

With the coming of metal, not only were improved tools for peaceful uses made available, but the weapons of war were rendered far more efficient. ‘I beheld Satan as lightning fallen from heaven.’ War between group and group and tribe and tribe became endemic. The greed which had wrecked the original planets seemed to have come down to earth.

Endnotes

[1] Source: The Legend of the Sons of God. A Fantasy? By T.C. Lethbridge; Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1972, ISBN 2-283-98128-8.
[2] NASA explorations of our solar system provide little support for Lethbridge’s War of the Planets and it seems unlikely that he would have chosen this particular scenario were he writing today. But Lethbridge believed there was evidence of a war in heaven and would have remained intrigued about what form this might have taken. However there are other matters Lethbridge raises with his fairy story. Lethbridge had a life-long interest in the dispersal theories of his generation of archaeologists. Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in the Court of King Arthur is relevant in this regard, as are the voyages of Thor Heyerdahl. [Ed]
[3] Lethbridge had a close call on one of his Artic expeditions. For a few hours the expedition was convinced that their ship would be crushed by the ice. Maurice Cotterell has developed similar ideas about the fate of stranded ‘visitors’ from a higher culture based on the supposition that Atlantis did indeed exist and was destroyed suddenly in the manner reported by Solon and Plato. See Chapter 10 on The Atlantean Cataclysm in The Mayan Prophecies; Element Books, 1995, ISBN 1-85230-888-5. [Ed]

 

© Tom Lethbridge 1972 [1]

The standing stones of Callanish are in their way quite as remarkable as those of Stonehenge, for they form a strange pattern. In the middle is a single pillar fifteen feet high with a small and, probably later, rifled megalithic tomb at its foot. The central pillar forms the hub of a circle of stones enclosing an area thirty-seven feet across, or about the size of a tennis court. From this radiate one double and three single lines of uprights. They nearly form a cross, but do not quite do so. It is a strange and rather uncanny place to see in the usual pouring rain as it stands on a low hill. The double avenue heads almost true north for nearly a hundred yards.

Loch Roag is divided into two by the island of Bernara, which fits into it rather like a biscuit stuck in a dog’s mouth. On the shore of Bernara facing Callanish are two more standing stones, looking as if they once marked a path across to the island where now is sea. It was probably dry land when the stones were put up, for fresh water Bronze Age peats can be seen round the shore today for several feet below high tide mark.

Archaeologists as a whole pay little attention to Callanish. It does not appear strange to them that such a remarkable construction should be found in such a remote setting. If it had been in Kent or Gloucestershire it would be thronged, but in the Outer Islands nobody cares. Yet it is the very situation of the thing which is so strange.

It stands far out on the rim of the western ocean and there seems to be no possibility that there can ever have been a large population out there. Why should there be? The land must at the best of times have always been very poor. The Ring of Stennis in Orkney is not so strange, for the Orkneys are not so bleak as this stretch of the Long Island.

Not long ago it was suggested that Callanish was raised as a kind of substation of Stonehenge and both were intended as observatories to plot lunar eclipses. Even if this idea were correct, it implies a great organization far away who could journey to the distant north and either bring their labour with them or collect enough local men to do the work. I do not feel that it makes sense. Neither do I see how any great religious idea could have been called into play. Why put it there? There must have been more populous areas elsewhere, where such things could have been needed.

However, suppose that some survey party had been dropped off out there to look for minerals or any other purpose, it might have been necessary to construct a landing mark of identifiable shape so that supplies could be dropped, or the explorers could be picked up when their time was up.

Callanish in Lewis and Stennis in Orkney, could they not have been the identification signals set up by two exploration parties to draw attention to themselves so that there would be no doubt where their bases were situated? All this would be hundreds of years before another station, the bluestone ring, was transported to Stonehenge.

If this possibly absurd suggestion has any foundation in fact, was it all in vain? Were none of these stations ever collected again because something happened to their home planet? Did these pioneers work their way back to more developed lands and there, by their superior technical knowledge, become for a time sons of God? Did they naturally become kings and rulers and try to keep their stock reasonably distinct for thousands of years, until philosophers formulated the idea that all men were equal?

Probably we will never know the answer, but it is possible to ask the question now; first because men are beginning to make exploratory expeditions to worlds themselves and second because a very great quantity of information is being published suggesting that unknown flying machines may be coming from outside to examine our own planet. As I said before, I have had no experience of this, yet I find the mass of observed facts need an explanation.

There seems to be a considerable difference between the monuments on the outlying islands and peninsulas and others far inland. They may represent successive stages in some form of exploratory development. If I am right in identifying Tipperary as the original site of the Stonehenge bluestones, its situation is not unlike that of Stonehenge, being convenient to river systems and old trackway routes along both of which native labour could be called in to help.

Another famous circle, Avebury, could have been the original central point in the south of Britain before Stonehenge was thought of. If we are trying to plot the possible plan of exploration, then Avebury would come high on the list. But Avebury was less convenient by water though better situated for movements by land.

Of course the most dramatic of all these constructions in the west, for the later Stonehenge is in a different category, is Carnac on Quiberon Bay in Brittany. Here the remains of eleven long avenues of standing stones still survive, with parts of a great stone circle largely ruined by recent houses.

The stone avenues apparently once extended for several miles and over a thousand stones still remain in place. If there was a central base where power was generated to operate bio-electronic beacons, this would have been the place. Although much further south, it stands in a somewhat similar position to Callanish, with a drowned land surface beneath the sea in front of it.

The purpose of these great stone avenues is completely unknown. There are many burial mounds associated with them as there are around Stonehenge; but that does not say that the rows had anything to do with burial. If there was any religious purpose in their construction, surely it implies a population much more of the order of that today than one of scattered and primitive farmers? One would have thought that the whole population of Brittany in those days would not have provided a fitting congregation.

We will leave Carnac for the moment and return to Britain. I have already mentioned the stone rows on Dartmoor. Of course these are in no way comparable to the massed avenues at Carnac, but they are reasonably impressive and there are quite a number of them dotted about the moor. I have taken the approximate bearings of eight of them and projected these lines to see what happens.

It was obvious at once that the one at Black Tor when projected cuts another row at Warren House, in an area seamed and scarred with very ancient tin workings. It may be a coincidence, but these two lines could have given you a cross-bearing on rich deposits of tin, long before maps are supposed to have existed.

In any case how did anybody know that there was tin in Britain without long and elaborate prospecting? I have never liked theories based on ideas of projected lines, but it is curious nevertheless. If there is anything at all in the beacon idea, this gives it some confirmation.

The two rows mentioned are not the only suggestive ones. That at Sharp Tor when produced runs very close to Avebury itself. Those at Fernworthy, Chagford and Higher White Tor hit the great monolith on the summit of Exmoor near The Chains.

None of this is quite exact according to modern measurements, but if you were making observations in an unknown and unmapped land, they would be remarkably good. It may all be nonsense, or it may not. But if it is nonsense something will turn up to show that it is.

It has been hinted that Carnac might be the most important place in the whole system. If so, and if there is anything in the idea at all, one at least of the stone rows on Dartmoor should give an approximate bearing on Carnac. Actually three do, the double row on Headland Warren and the single ones at Dartmeet and Butterdon.

I do not even suggest that this idea of bio-electronic beacons is the right answer. All I am trying to demonstrate here is that there is something here which could possibly fit into a picture of ancient exploration which we know nothing about.

However, to return to the spread of the remnants of bio-electronic knowledge, let us look at some of the traditions still handed on. The islanders of Easter Island believe that the great stone statues there were set up by the ‘mana’, that is the extra-sensory power of the king, who was especially trained to develop it.

This takes us at once to the world wide belief that such power was available and could be used. If such power can be utilised, surely that is how Stonehenge and other monuments must have been moved and erected? Merlin is said to have done it by marvellous power.

Is this very different, except in degree, to the almost universal stone-throwing trick of the poltergeist, which is frequently reported from all over the old world and the new? A poltergeist is apparently the involuntary mental movement of solid objects by what is now known as telekinesis. If the mind of a somewhat mentally retarded girl can somehow produce numerous wet pebbles from the bed of a stream and throw them about in a house, what could have been done by a mind specially trained to use this power?

What is known about telekinesis, if we must use this depressing technical term? It is probably much more common than most people suppose and frequently passes unnoticed. It may even take place at times in every family and simply be unrecognized as such, for the bulk of modern town-dwelling humanity is deeply unobservant.

How many people have not had the experience of a letter vanishing completely? Of course they usually put this down to carelessness on somebody’s part, or forgetfulness, or something of that kind. But very often there is no reason to suppose that this is the right answer. Yet it is usually so small a matter that it is passed over as an accident. It is only when poltergeist activity becomes really violent that anybody takes any notice of it and even then they often try to explain it by trickery. It was not so in earlier times. Everything out of the ordinary was carefully noticed.

But are we talking nonsense? Is there any such thing as mana? I must say that I existed for quite a long time with a complete disbelief in such a force; now I am not quite so sure. I rather wonder whether civilized man has not just forgotten how to use it through being so pleased with his other attainments. Even today people still say ‘thought is power’, although I doubt if many of them know what they mean by this remark.

Now it is possible to demonstrate that there is something in the theory of mana. We have, as I describer earlier, done repeatable experiments with pebbles picked off the beach at Seaton and tested them with a pendulum. If the pebbles are picked up with a pair of tongs and then tested one by one, they only react to their chemical composition.

But if I take one out and throw it against a wall, then it will respond to the 24-inch male rate. If my wife does the same, the answer is 29-inches for the female. This can be repeated as long as you can be bothered to do it. It is a scientific test, in that it is repeatable, and it shows that some unknown property of the man or woman passes from him or her to the stone. This makes the existence of mana a little less absurd.

The thing which surprised me most was that mana is extremely long lasting. I found the dates for the sling stones from the camps to be all around 320 BC. Was it then mana which gave the effect of an electric shock when my wife and I tested the stones of the Merry Maidens stone circle in Cornwall? It seems that it must have been. If so mana is apparently a bio-electronic force and it should be possible to learn a lot about it.

These experiments with pebbles differ from poltergeist phenomena in one important matter. The poltergeist operator does it involuntarily and probably has no idea that he or she is doing it. Our experiments were deliberate. We were trying to see whether we could put anything into the electromagnetic fields of the stones which could be detected. Call the anything mana if you like; whatever name is given to it, it appears to exist.

Now, if by using trivial objects such as pebbles off the beach you can show that it is possible to alter their electromagnetic fields by making use of them, what could be learnt if you really got down to years of study of the why and the wherefore of it all? Suppose many men through long periods studied it as closely as modern physics has been studied, might not the results be quite astonishing?

It seems to me that scraps of evidence all over the world appear to indicate that this has once been done. But was it ever done here? Is it not possible that what now survives is but a fragment of all that could be remembered of what was taught to the local people by our hypothetical explorers?

Were the local people not encouraged to build up the power of the stone circles and other beacon marks by dancing, and had not some explanation been given them of why it was necessary for them to do so? Of course this is just a guess, but where did so-called primitive peoples such as the Kahunas of the Pacific get their learning?

There is no anthropological suggestion that Pacific Islanders ever sat down to think out metaphysical ideas for themselves. The teachings of the Kahunas seem to have been derived from a far higher level of civilization than anything observed by Europeans when they first made their way into the Pacific.

Their control of fire, the forces of nature, of disease and so on and their beliefs in the different levels of man’s existence seem to argue a long period of deep reflection and study behind them. The higher self, for instance, is surely something which is only beginning to be glimpsed today by people working on extra-sensory perception; while the lower self seems to have been just touched on by modern students of the subconscious.

Your higher self, said the Kahunas, if you could get in touch with it, could do anything for you; but you had to be able to contact it. It was not God and you were part of it. In fact it was very like the group soul, whose existence was apparently reported by Myers and others, after their deaths, to the research workers of a generation ago and to the spiritualists of today. It is remarkable that something of the kind can be deduced from a study of the pendulum.

Endnotes

[1] Source: The Legend of the Sons of God. A Fantasy? By T.C. Lethbridge; Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1972, ISBN 2-283-98128-8.

 

© Tom Lethbridge 1976 [1]

We have talked about a considerable amount of differing subjects in this study. Much of it probably does not make sense to those who read it. However, it may be less difficult to those who read psychology, although I think that all the evidence is that we are dealing with a Superconscious [2] and not some obscure part of the subconscious mind.

All sorts of nonsense is attributed to this corner of the subconscious mind’s mischievous tricks with ouija boards and such like. But, if a human mind can be shown to exist on a higher level than the mind on earth, is there any reason to suppose that it might not amuse itself at the expense of minds which did not treat it with proper respect? When approached reasonably this unknown factor of mind is most serious and extremely exact. It is the method of approach which is at fault. If you treat a higher version of yourself as if it were an idiot child, what can you expect but ridicule?

It seems to me, although I am not of course really capable of giving an opinion, that this unknown quality of mind is really our own self on the next level of the Spiral of Evolution. It knows far more than we do because (its vibrational level being much higher) it does not have to use a brain to filter out everything, except such parts of its experience as are suitable to life on earth.

It lives in a timeless zone and can consider everything at leisure. It is far more our real self than we are in bodily life. Time being instantaneous to it, it knows the earthly future of its own projected self. Yet, owing to the fact that each whorl of the spiral extends further out than the one beneath, there is bound to be some distortion when its knowledge is transmitted to the whorl below. This is clear when we draw it out in diagrams.

This part of our mentality appears to live forever, yet there are at least two higher whorls on the spiral. The one above our own has no rate for death. Somehow the mind appears to move on from the timeless state and re-enter a world where time passes once more.

There is no need to bother about this here. Obviously we are not meant to do much about it, for we seem to be here to gather information which can be contemplated higher up. But the spiral shows us a great deal which should be comforting to those who worry about what happens to themselves or their friends when they die.

As I have said, the next whorl of the spiral is larger and extends further out than the one on which we live. Nearly all things which we know here are on it also. Blue is blue and gold is gold. But when people’s minds slip up on to the higher level, either by accident or by illness or in sleep, they not infrequently report looking down on their earthly bodies from a height of a few feet above and to one side of them.

The spiral explains this completely. Being on the higher whorl, the viewer is both above and to one side of his body. Until he reaches the second whorl, he is in his body. When he is somehow jerked on to the second whorl, he is then higher up and at one side. This is not strange, it is obvious when once you have found the clue.

Divination with the pendulum is one reasonably exact way of learning things about higher levels of vibrations that is of whorls on the spiral, which are known as planes of living. The pendulum itself is no more than a piece of apparatus. It is not something with a mind of its own, nor magical in any way.

It can be nothing more than a lump of chewing gum on a length of cotton. But the operator’s mind has control over what the pendulum shall do. It can tell it for instance that it will count ten years for every turn the pendulum makes when tuned in to the 30-inch rate for age and held over a given object. Or the mind can tell it to count one year for each turn and it will apparently do so.

This does not mean the whole operation is mental. As I write this my mind is telling my brain so to control my pen that it will write down such words as I wish it to do. But the pen is the necessary inanimate instrument for the writing. So is the pendulum for this form of divination.

With a pendulum you could learn what was happening to a spacecraft on the far side of a planet, as easily as you can find out what is happening to the inside of somebody’s body to whom you are linked in Australia. We have done this, checked it and know that it is quite simple. Why it happens is another matter and it needs much practical, scientific study to find out. [3]

We are still finding ancient beliefs, which appear to be correct. Telepathy exists, as hundreds had affirmed it did, and now we appear to find that the mental side of our being owes something to those blood relations of ours who died long ago. There was some sense in it when the Arabs hung the pedigrees of their horses round their beautiful necks.

It seems probable that far too little attention is given to this kind of thing. After all you do not expect a Suffolk Punch to sire the winner of the Grand National; or a poodle and a fox terrier to produce the winning collie at the sheepdog trials. Such things are known to be absurd. Why should man be an exception to this heredity?

With sheepdogs at any rate it is mental qualities which you are testing at the trials, as anyone must know who has watched these beautiful animals. Many a time, at anchor in a Highland loch, I have watched three or four dogs bring along hundreds of sheep from a whole rugged mountain face, perhaps two thousand feet high or more, and never miss one amid the gullies and boulders.

Don’t tell me that this skill is due to environment. It is the result of careful breeding over hundreds of years. The same must be true of human beings and could be studied without too much difficulty. My wife’s boat skill or my attempts at drawing appear to be direct memories from single individuals and nothing to do with a nebulous subhuman part. I think it must have a direct connection with individual minds on a higher and not a lower level. It is superconscious rather than subconscious.

Hereditary memory is private to you and not available to humanity at large. I do not really believe that anything of this sort can be the subconscious tribal memories postulated by psychologists. It is too individual for that and there is no apparent distinction between different grades of it.

Of course this could be used as an argument in favour of reincarnation. It may be your own memory from a former existence that you are tapping. But it does not look as if this is the right answer, because you can get these memories from more than one ancestor. My drawing appears to come from my father but the love of the Hebrides seems to come from my mother’s people. These attributes could not have come from a single individual ancestor.

All the way through an investigation of this kind, it is the small indications which we must look for. Slowly they will build up into a great whole.

The Buddhists have their Wheel of Life, which is similar to our compass rose of rates; although they do not seem to have got as far as the spiral. But the general idea seems to be much the same. They believe that the mind goes on developing until it is at last absorbed in the whole of Mind (Nirvana). I think much of this must have been guessing, for it seems unlikely that their thinkers could have risen many whorls in the spiral. Still it does not appear to differ to any great extent from what the pendulum is trying to tell us.

As indifferently explained and comparatively misunderstood in the West, the Doctrine of Nirvana does not seem particularly attractive to those with a Christian background. But examined more closely, it seems top make more sense than the celestial concert parties which we were brought up to expect in a future life.

The Buddhist quest for Nirvana was a highly developed idea. Life on earth was thought to be an unpleasant experience; but you had to endure it again and again, not necessarily perhaps on the earth whorl, until you improved your mind to such an extent that it could join up with the greater one. Although this is often translated as oblivion, that seems to be a most unlikely answer. The smaller mind is simply joined to a greater one and an increased sense of perfection and bliss could well result from the union as the Buddhists believe; but individuality remains.

A few people may think that their intelligence is perfect but the great majority know its limits and would welcome additions to it. Whether the Buddhist Nirvana is far higher still is a matter of guessing both for us and for them. However, I can see little at fault in the Buddhist theory as far as we are instructed by the pendulum. It might well be that Christianity would look much the same as Buddhism, if it were stripped of the barnacles of dogma, which have grown on its hull through the ages; but the barnacles have grown so thick that it is hard to see the ship inside.

The Lord Buddha probably never saw the sea and his doctrine, produced far away from it, was bound to be unsatisfactory in some directions. It did not account for the men who moved on what seemed to be a totally alien element. Christian, Moslem and Hebrew all knew the beauty and fear of the ocean. Not so the Buddhist and therefore he was condemned to an almost endless circle of boring lives.

No, there is not enough of the seaman ‘chancing his arm’ in Buddhism. I have quoted elsewhere the fine remark on this subject in the Orkneyinga Saga. When Sigurd, Earl of Orkney, asked his mother whether he should go to Dublin and fight in the war against the native Irish, she replied: ‘I would have raised thee in my wool-chest had I thought that thou shouldst live for ever.’ Sigurd went and did not return. But he won an honoured name in the process and perhaps his mother was consoled with that. My wife once said: ‘I can’t understand people who are always looking for security. Surely the whole point of life is to learn how to deal with insecurity.’

No real artist can ever be secure, for he knows that he can never create a perfect picture. Whatever he does he will see flaws in it. It was for this reason that the Moslems always used to put an error in the weaving of a rug. Allah would not like it to be perfect. Only Allah could make the perfect thing. I like this idea. Many of their ideas are good and their ancient literature shows a sense of humour far in advance of anything in contemporary medieval Europe.

Now the only faith you need in order to get to this stage of thinking is a belief that your observations from your own experiments are reasonably accurate. You do not start with somebody’s statement that God wishes you to do this or that. You collect observed fact, which appears to tell you what I have written now and from these facts you reason. To this extent you are far nearer to the scientific approach.

But the reasoning from what you have observed brings you closer to the faith of the religious people. What is the obvious conclusion that you are likely to draw? Surely it must be that somebody, long ago, worked all this out in a scientific manner and that much religious teaching today is the survival here and there of part of what was once knowledge.

Endnotes

[1] Source: final two chapters (12 & 13 pages 104-110) of the published writings of T.C. Lethbridge; The Power of the Pendulum; Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1976, ISBN 1-85063-003-8 published five years after Lethbridge’s death.
[2] 'The human mind possesses an unconscious basement, full of black beetles and vermin, but it also possesses a superconscious attic, which is as much ‘above’ ordinary consciousness as the basement is below it…it is this ‘attic’ which is responsible for paranormal powers like telepathy, second sight and precognition.’ Colin Wilson’s summary of Aldous Huxley’s views in the epilogue to Aleister Crowley (page 163-166). [Ed]
[3] Source (from here): final chapter of The Power of the Pendulum by T.C. Lethbridge.

 

© Tom Lethbridge 1976 [1]

For most of Christendom, since the Dark Ages, God has been thought of and illustrated as an august human father figure with a beard. According to the Bible, God suggested and made man in His own image and so it was reasonable to suppose that God bore some resemblance to the bearded men of the age.

ut this is mainly based on a Hebrew view of God. Other races had other ideas and some even applied the term to living men with outstanding qualities. Roman Emperors, for instance, became gods and Herod, before his unfortunate infestation with worms, had been hailed as a god.

It seems probable that many gods of the ancient world had had their origin in living men who had once been famous in their day. Things became even more confusing when we appreciate that the word ‘Devil’ in reality refers to a god of a different faith and is not necessarily evil at all. In fact the ‘div’ or ‘dev’ part of the word means ‘holy’. It is easy to see that this conflict of meanings, when added to that of the difficulty of ‘spirit’, becomes very complicated for laymen and professional religious alike.

When confronted with a tangle of this sort, and especially a tangle whose origins go back into the mists of time, the best thing to do seems to be to cut out all the dead wood. Then we can regard both God and Spirit as something mental. Let us say that God is Mind. We will no longer regard God as a bearded old man. Man is created with a mind in the image of the Great Creator. The beard is of no importance, for this is not mind but body. In fact man is created with a bit of mind, which can think.

There is no reason to suppose that I have got this right, but it may be worth thinking about as we progress in this investigation. Man may be a little bit of mind separated off from the Universal Mind of the Creator of Everything. Of course this does not fit in with the doctrine of chance, but it is really very hard to see how you could get anything at all unless someone started it. Why should there be anything on which chance could operate?

Although I cannot bring myself to believe in the old man with a beard, I find the chance idea still less probable. Even man can create to a moderate extent; why should not a much greater mind create far more extensively? To assume, as many do, that any trivial human mind can know the purpose and intention of a mind which can sprinkle the Universe with numberless stars, seems to me to be little more than gross presumption.

To get any sense out of the idea, it seems necessary to assume the existence of a vast hierarchy of minds in descending order from the Great One at the top to the tiny human specimen beneath. But it might go farther than this, with a spark of mind existing in every living organism.

I hope to show presently that man appears to have the ability of detaching portions of his mind and locating these in the things he makes or uses. In this way perhaps our assumed hierarchy could be formed. It would be thought into existence and each unit would be an image of the Creator; not in bodily appearance, but in the way in which it thought. It is interesting to note that this story of the creation of man in God’s image is not confined to the Bible but is found in much the same form in the pre-Spanish legends of America.

The study of thought is of fundamental importance. With it you seem to be able to create. It is the force with which Mind operates. Enlarge your thinking and you extend your mind. Do not do so, or rely on the products of other people’s thinking, and you are more useless than a slug creeping on the surface of the earth.

For evolution appears to be a command from the Creator of the Universe, though it differs very much from the evolution of the Darwin and Huxley variety. Although I have taken little interest in the theory of reincarnation, yet it seems very probable that those who cannot be bothered to develop their minds will have to return to earth again after death and do the whole business again.

It may be of interest to describe one of my attempts to investigate the old gods. [2] There was a god of the sea, Manannan, to whom the Celts of Britain paid homage. Very little is recorded about him, yet his name remains in Clackmannan in Scotland, which means Manannan’s stone. There are also well-known hobby-horse rituals performed on May Day down the coast of Devon and Cornwall by sea fishermen and it is assumed that the hobby-horses may well be the white horses of the sea, who also belonged to Poseidon. Therefore one might suspect that Poseidon and Manannan are two names for the one god. This happens to most ancient gods. Isis was said to have a thousand names.

Yet who really thinks that there was such an entity as Poseidon? I can’t say that it seems possible today to visualise anyone of the sort. But, if for hundreds of years men concentrated their thoughts on a figure of this kind and wished fervently for its help, what would happen? Each one probably detached something of his mind into the creation of this non-existent figure. Poseidon becomes a mass of detached thoughts and there was a Poseidon.

I think he would not be what we call alive in an earthly sense. But he would be a cloud of force, which some might be able to tap. We surely must not look on the old gods as never having existed. They existed as long as men believed in their existence. The old witches still believe that they can see them if they go through the correct ritual.

It is well recorded that the fishermen of the North of Lewis used to wade into the sea at the beginning of the fishing season and pour a libation of beer to a sea god, who has been named as Shoney. I do not think that this was his name but simply a distortion of the Gaelic for Holy One.

Recently I read a book by Lilian Beckwith called Green Hand. This interested me for it was a careful study of the fishing life of Mallaig and the Western islands. Miss Beckwith included a curious jingle. I felt she must have heard it aboard a fishing boat at a party described in the book. The little rhyme went like this:

Ickle, Ockle, Blue Bockle,
Fishes in the Sea.
If you’re looking for a lover,
Please choose me.

It was the Blue Bockle, which caught my eye. For Bocan is a godling in Gaelic and Bogle is the same in Scots. Blue Bockle is a blue godling and presumably he came from the Outer Hebrides. Then I got down to the whole rhyme. It is a quaint mixture of Scots and Gaelic. I think it can be translated like this:

Little, youthful, blue godling
(Of the) fishes of the sea.
If you’re looking for devotion,
Please choose me.

This appears to be the charm, which the men of Lewis called to Shoney when they poured beer into the sea. For many years I had waited for this clue. The Blue Men of the Minch were gods.

Now the normal Celtic god has three phases (or personalities), young, prime of life, and old. There would be three Blue Men, or just possibly nine, for each phase in turn might be triple. The Blue Bockle was the young one. To the old one (probably called bodach gorm) they sacrificed cattle. Are our coastwise hobby-horses with their emphasis on fertility, the steeds of the god in his prime? I think it is very likely, and we have the whole cycle of the worship of Manannan.

I don’t know if Poseidon was blue, but I seem to remember that he was dark. Even when ashore he was associated with white horses and fertility; while black bulls were thrown into the sea in his honour. It looks very much as if Poseidon and Manannan are synonymous. How would you describe a god of this kind? I think it would be as a cloud of past memories; but it is to some extent animated by the combined minds of those who created it. It can probably be seen and most certainly it can be felt.

A single individual can produce a ghost or ghoul by his thought or memory projected into an electromagnetic field. Many people together in a similar way can project a mass thought or memory and it becomes known as a god or a demon. Both types really belong to the second mental level on which time does not appear to operate and so to earth-living minds they may appear in past or future time. Without some other interference they would never end at all. The gods are immortal.

I have told in Ghost and Ghoul how a gypsy woman once came to my house in Cambridge and asked for a gold coin, which she was convinced that I had. She would not believe there was no such coin in the house. The coin was found many years later in Devon. She had got her dating confused owing to the absence of time on the next level whence she drew her information somehow.

This absence of time on one whorl and its presence on others, is a fundamental matter and until it is understood the errors in dreams and foretelling the future will remain inexplicable. Now, however, that we can begin to get our information collected in diagrammatical form, it should become easier to understand.

No doubt there will be mistakes in my attempts at explanation; but it is open to anybody to write down his dreams and examine them for himself and it is also possible for at least half mankind to experiment with the pendulum. (The idea that few can be dowsers is wrong).

The picture that seems to be forming is not utterly unlike Dunne’s theory of serialism. There appears to be a series of observers (if you can so describe a succession of degrees of mental awareness) but they are not exact counterparts of the original observer. The time succession is quite unlike his, for the second observer finds himself on a mental plane where there is succession but no movement of time. On the third plane, time begins to move once more.

It seems possible that the Roman Catholic idea of Purgatory originated in some knowledge of what appears to happen on the second timeless whorl. The more one looks into these subjects, the clearer it becomes that far back in the past ages men knew much more about them than they do today. One has only to look at the teachings of Jesus, Buddha and the Kahunas to see that this must be so.

It is hard to visualise what happens on the second plane. But perhaps it is not particularly inept to picture each particular incident as a stone thrown into quiet water with ripples spreading out in all directions. There will be an infinite number of these points and the ripples will have no troughs between them.

The earth level time will pass through a particular point in a straight line; whichever way it passes through, it will hit the same successions. However, some will go forward and some backward. If you happen to concentrate on the backward ripples, you will return from sleep with an impression of things moving backwards.

However, if you concentrate on the forward series, you will at first get ordinary memories of events which have already happened in earth time; and then, as the point on the second level does not move, you will receive impressions of things which have not yet happened.

Whether the second-level impressions are more true than those on the earth plane is difficult to decide. A little way back we had a hint that telepathy at any rate operated on this level. If this is right, then telepathic dreams must pass from the second level to the earth plane and so perhaps all do. The impact of the stone on the water may be spread out in earth time so that we can learn more from what we appreciate.

Although this is all most difficult to understand, yet it has to be explained somehow and for the moment I can get no further with it. We must not forget there is a third level above the second on which time moves on again once more. There is even a fourth level above this, where once again moving time appears to exist.

Of course the term ‘level’ is not correct. It would be more exact to speak of whorls of the spiral. Their number may be unlimited, yet we have as yet only found evidence of one (the second) on which time is static. On this one too there is no response to death at 80-inches although there is for black on the same rate.

Therefore the second whorl appears to differ very greatly from the one on which our minds normally appear to function. Although reds, greens and blues are still there and silver is still silver, there is no apparent passing of time and there is no need for you to go to sleep or die on it before moving on to the third.

Of course I am only getting this information from the pendulum; but numerous other experimenters are now beginning to get similar results to mine and at least at one point there appears to be a link with orthodox science.

Endnotes

[1] Source: Chapter 2 (pages 14-17) and Chapter 5 (pages 49-52) in The Power of the Pendulum; Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1976, ISBN 1-85063-003-8.
[2] Lethbridge was influenced by the research and theories of his friend Margaret Alice Murray. See Dr. Murray’s The God of the Witches; NuVisions Publications, 2005, ISBN 1-59547-981-3. [Ed]

 

© Stephen Jay Gould 2001 [1]

The magisterium of science covers the empirical realm: what is the universe made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). The magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. These two magisteria do not overlap. Nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for example, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty). To cite the old clichés, science gets the age of rocks, and religion the rock of ages; science studies how the heavens go, religion how to go to heaven.

I believe, with all my heart, in a respectful, even loving, concordat between the magisteria of science and religion. This is a principled position on moral and intellectual grounds, not a merely diplomatic solution. But it cuts both ways. If religion can no longer dictate the nature of factual conclusions residing properly within the magisterium of science, then scientists cannot claim higher insight into moral truth from any superior knowledge of the world’s empirical constitution.

In advocating this argument over many years, I have found that skeptical friends and colleagues do not challenge the logic of the argument - which almost everyone accepts as both intellectually sound and eminently practical in our world of diverse passions - but rather question my claim that most religious and scientific leaders actually do advocate such precepts.

We all recognize, of course, that many folks and movements hold narrow and aggressive partisan positions, usually linked to an active political agenda, and based on exalting one side while bashing the other. Obviously, extremists of the so-called Christian right, particularly the small segment dedicated to imposing creationism on the science curricula of American public schools, represent the most visible subgroup of these partisans.

But I also include, among my own scientific colleagues, some militant atheists whose blinkered concept of religion grasps none of the subtlety or diversity, and equates this entire magisterium with the silly and superstitious beliefs of people who think they have seen a divinely crafted image of the Virgin in the drying patterns of morning dew on the plate-glass windows of some auto show-room in New Jersey.

I believe that we must pursue a primarily political struggle, not an intellectual discourse, with these people. With some exceptions, of course, people who have dedicated the bulk of their energy, and even their life’s definition, to such aggressive advocacy at the extremes do not choose to engage in serious and respectful debate. All people committed to the defense of honorable differences will have to remain vigilant and prevail politically.

Even after we put the extremists aside, however, many people still suppose that major religious and scientific leaders must remain at odds (or at least must interact in considerable tension) because these two incompatible fields inevitably struggle for possession of the same ground.

If I can therefore show that the doctrine of Non-Overlapping Magisteria enjoys strong and fully explicit support, even from the primary cultural stereotypes of hard-line traditionalism, then its status as a sound position of general consensus, established by long struggle among people of goodwill in both magisteria - and not as a funny little off-the-wall suggestion by a few misguided peacemakers on an inevitable battlefield - should emerge into the clearest possible light.

Modern creationism, alas, has provoked a real battle thus supporting the Doctrine of Non-Overlapping Magisteria with a positive example of the principle that all apparent struggles between science and religion really arise from violations of the doctrine, when a small group allied to one magisterium tries to impose its irrelevant and illegitimate will upon the other’s domain. Such genuine historical battles do not pit science against religion, but represent a power play by zealots formally allied to one side, and trying to impose their minority views upon the magisterium of the other side.

The saga of attempts by creationists to ban the teaching of evolution, or to force their own fundamentalist version of life’s history into science curricula of public schools, represents one of the most interesting, distinctive, and persistent episodes in the cultural history of twentieth-century America. I have no problem with the largest and most potentially influential of all creationist groups in America, the Jehovah’s Witnesses - for they do not try to impose their theological beliefs upon public school science curricula, and they agree with my view that churches and homes are the proper venue for teaching such private and partisan doctrines.

Our struggle with creationism is political and specific, not religious at all, and not even intellectual in any genuine sense. Young-earth Creationism offers nothing of intellectual merit but just a hodgepodge of claims properly judged within the magisterium of science. The forceful and persistent attempt by Young-earth Creationists to insinuate their partisan and minority theological dogma into the science curricula of American public schools cannot be read, in any legitimate way, as an episode in any supposedly general warfare between science and religion.

In the early 1920s, several Southern states passed flat-out anti-evolution statutes. The Tennessee law, for example, declared it a crime to teach that ‘man had descended from a lower order of animals.’ In a challenge to the constitutionality of these statutes, the American Civil Liberties Union instigated the famous Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee in 1925. William Jennings Bryan decided to make his last stand on this issue thereby giving the creationist movement both influence and contacts. [2]

John Scopes was a young free-thinker, who was quite popular among his fundamentalist students and worked as the physics teacher and track coach of the local high school. He had substituted for the fundamentalist biology teacher during an illness and had assigned the chapters on evolution from the class textbook, A Civic Biology, by George William Hunter. Scopes consented to be the stalking horse for a legal challenge to the constitutionality of the Tennessee anti-evolution law.

The rest is history, as filtered and distorted for most Americans, through the fictionalized account in a wonderful play, Inherit the Wind, written in 1955 by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee. Two film versions featured Spencer Tracy playing Clarence Darrow and Fredric Marsh as William Jennings Bryan in the first, and Kirk Douglas as Darrow and Jason Robards as Bryan in the later remake for television.

In the 1980s the creationists regrouped, and came back fighting with a new strategy designed to circumvent constitutional problems. They had always honorably identified their alternative system as explicitly theological, and doctrinally based in a literal reading of the Bible. But now they expurgated their texts, inventing the oxymoronic concept of ‘creation science’. Religion, it seems, and contrary to all previous pronouncements, has no bearing upon the subject at all. The latest discoveries of pure science now reveal a factual world that just happens to correlate perfectly with the literal pronouncements of the Book of Genesis.

In such a circumstance, legislative intervention becomes unnecessary. And besides, the creationists continued, we’re not asking schools to ban evolution anymore. Now we are only demanding ‘equal time’ for ‘creation science’ in any classroom that also teaches evolution. Of course, if they decide not to teach evolution at all…well…then…

A few years ago, I came across a theological term that tickled my fancy, both for its touch of the arcane, and its mellifluous ring - irenics (from the Greek word for ‘peace’), defined in opposition to polemics, as a branch of Christian theology that ‘presents points of agreement among Christians with a view to the ultimate unity of Christianity’ (Oxford English Dictionary).

By extension (and the word has crept out of theological circles and into general English usage), irenic people and proposals ‘tend to promote peace, especially in relation to theological and ecclesiastical differences.’ Now I’m an irenic fellow at heart - and I trust that most of us so regard ourselves, whatever personal quirks and foibles stand in the way of realization.

I believe in an irenic solution under a large umbrella extending far beyond the purely Christian realm of official definitions cited above. I join nearly all people of goodwill in wishing to see two old and cherished institutions, our two rocks of ages - science and religion - coexisting in peace while each works to make a distinctive patch for the integrated coat of many colors that will celebrate the distinctions of our lives, yet cloak human nakedness in a seamless covering called wisdom.

Irenics sure beats the polemics of ill-conceived battle between science and religion - a thoroughly false model that too often continues to envelop us for illogical reasons of history and psychology. I do get discouraged when some of my colleagues tout their private atheism (their right, of course, and in many ways my own suspicion as well) as a panacea for human progress against an absurd caricature of ‘religion’, erected as a straw man for rhetorical purposes.

Religion just can’t be equated with Genesis literalism, the miracle of the liquefying blood of Saint Januarius (which at least provides an excuse for the wonderful and annual San Gennaro Festival on the streets of New York), or the Bible codes of kabbalah and modern media hype.

If these colleagues wish to fight superstition, irrationalism, philistinism, ignorance, dogma, and a host of other insults to the human intellect (often politically converted into dangerous tools of murder and oppression as well), then God bless them - but don’t call this enemy ‘religion’.

Similarly, of course, I pronounce my anathema upon those dogmatists and ‘true believers’ who, usurping the good name of religion for their partisan doctrines, try to suppress the uncomfortable truths of science, or to impose their peculiar brand of moral fiber upon people with legitimately different tastes. In the past, religion set the outlines that everyone had to accept, and science then had to conform. Irenics in this older mode required that the principles and findings of science yield religious results known in advance to be true. Indeed such conformity represented the primary test of science’s power and validity.

The Reverend Thomas Burnet (1635-1715), [3] a close friend and colleague of Isaac Newton, did not doubt that the biblical narrative recorded the earth’s actual history; his scientific job, by his lights, required validation of this known history in terms of causation by invariant natural laws rather than miracles.

But the spectacular growth and success of science has turned the tables for modern versions of syncretism. Now the conclusions of science must be accepted a priori, and religious interpretations must be finessed and adjusted to match unimpeachable results from the magesterium of natural knowledge! The Big Bang happened, and we must now find God at this tumultuous origin.

I also feel particularly sensitive about this issue because, as I wrote this book in the summer of 1998, a deluge of media hype enveloped the syncretist position, as though some startlingly new and persuasive argument had been formulated, or some equally exciting and transforming discovery had been made.

In fact, absolutely nothing of intellectual novelty had been added, as the same bad arguments surfaced into a glare of publicity because the J.M. Templeton Foundation, established by its fabulously wealthy eponym to advance the syncretist program under the guise of more general and catholic (small c) discussion about science and religion, garnered a splash of media attention by spending 1.4 million bucks to hold a conference in Berkeley on ‘Science and the spiritual quest'.

In a genuine example of true creation ex nihilo - that is, the invention of an issue by fiat of media reports, rather than by force of argument or content of material - at least three major sources preached the syncretist gospel in their headlines and vapidly uncritical reports: ‘Faith and reason, Together Again' (The Wall Street Journal, June 12); ‘Science and religion: bridging the Great Divide’ (The New York Times, June 30); and a cover story in Newsweek, 'Science Finds God’. Scientists could only be mystified by this last claim, but at least we can now be certain about one of God’s attributes: he sells newspapers and magazines.

The Times article admitted the intellectual torpor of the proceedings: ‘A kind of Sunday school politeness pervaded the meeting, with none of the impassioned confrontations expected from such an emotionally charged subject…The audience politely applauded after each presentation. But there was little sense of intellectual excitement.’

But from whence could such excitement arise in principle? If the Doctrine of Non-Overlapping Magisteria holds, then facts and explanations developed under the magesterium of science cannot validate (or deny) the precepts of religion. Indeed, if we look at the so-called arguments for syncretism, as described in these reports, they all devolve into a series of fuzzy statements awash in metaphor and illogic.

Darwin has been read as something of a moral dolt, or at least as a slacker on the subject, for his frequent disclaimers about drawing lessons for the meaning of human life from his revolutionary reorganization of biological knowledge. Shouldn’t such a radical reinterpretation of nature offer us some guidance for the biggest questions of the ages: Why are we here, and what does it all mean?

How could anyone look so deeply into the heart of biological causality and the history of life, and then offer us so little on the meaning of life and the ultimate order of things. To which Darwin responded: ‘I feel deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.’

Was Darwin just a coward? A desiccated intellect? A small-minded man? The very stereotype of a scientist who can describe a tree and ignore the forest, or analyze the notes and not hear the symphony?

I view Darwin in an entirely opposite manner. He maintained, throughout his life, a basic human fascination for the great questions of morals and meanings, and he recognized the transcendent importance of such inquiry. But he knew both the strengths and the limitations of his chosen profession, and he understood that the power of science could only be advanced and consolidated on the fertile ground of its own magesterium. In short, Darwin rooted his views about science and morality in the principle of Non-Overlapping Magisteria.

Darwin did not use evolution to promote atheism, or to maintain that no concept of God could ever be squared with the structure of nature. Rather, he argued that nature’s factuality, as read within the magesterium of science, could not resolve, or even specify, the existence or character of God, the ultimate meaning of life, the proper foundations of morality, or any other question within the different magesterium of religion.

Endnotes

[1] Source: Rock of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life by Stephen Jay Gould (Jonathan Cape, 2001, ISBN 0-224-06092-9).
[2] See The Last Stand of William Jennings Bryan by William Shepherd.
[3] Burnet wrote one of the most influential books of the late seventeenth century - Telluris theoria sacra, or The Sacred Theory of the Earth, a work in four sections: (1) on the deluge of Noah; (2) on the preceding paradise; (3) on the forthcoming ‘burning of the world’; and (4) ‘concerning the new heavens and new earth’, or paradise regained after the conflagration. This book not only became a ‘bestseller’ in its own generation, but gained lasting fame as a primary inspiration for Giambattista Vico’s Scienza nuova or New Science (1725) and George Buffon’s Histoire naturelle or Natural History (1749). [Ed]

© Tom Lethbridge 1967 [1]

I have asked a lot of difficult questions already, but this one is more likely to land me in a pickle than most. All through history there have been occasional great teachers, often now spoken of by the Hindu term, ‘avatar’, whose births seem to have been inexplicable and teachings far higher than those of the surrounding populace. Did these avatars come down from higher levels of deliberate purpose to try to help people living on a lower level of vibration?

There appear to have been female avatars as well as male; although they are not often mentioned nowadays. Aradia, the avatar of the religion now known as witchcraft, was supposedly born of the goddess, Diana, and taught her disciples both how to handle the bio-electric power and the freedom of the individual, in a manner strongly reminiscent of the great male teachers.

The only candidate that I know of from America was Quetzalcoatl, also a character of mysterious origin. It is interesting, too, that, though he did not apparently claim that rank, Jesus did not deny that he was a son of God. He seemed rather to imply that all or many men were this, although they did not know it. At the same time he insisted that he was the son of Man. Presumably here once again we are up against the old difficulty of the real meaning of words.

The paternity of all avatars is mysterious. This of course may be an idea of the priestly caste to add glamour to the founder of their religion. Even Buddha, although claimed by the orthodox to have come from a respectably princely family, is said to have been fathered by an elephant. By this one supposes that the elephant-headed god, Ganesa, is implied. However to go into the maze of Indian mythology would be more trouble than it is worth. It is more incomprehensible to the western mind than that of ancient Greece or Rome.

The point to remember about three of the avatars at any rate is that they were able to instruct their followers not only with a general code of behaviour but how to control the power of living electricity, which is apparently what ESP is. The Buddhists took this teaching to much greater lengths than anybody in the west. The Christians largely either failed to grasp it or forgot it. The witches knew a lot about it and even bred people deliberately to increase their so-called psychic powers.

The importance of this in our particular enquiry lies in the fact that anyone living on a level of what we might perhaps call ‘higher potential’ would have to lower his voltage in some way before being able to cope with earthly surroundings at all. He would also have to register. That means that somehow he had to make allowances for the distortion due to the position of things on the two, or perhaps more, different whorls of the spiral.

It is here then I can see a possible error happening nearly two thousand years ago. In the Biblical story of the terrible future calamity in which the sun would be ‘turned into darkness and the moon into blood’, had there been a mistake in which ring in the sequence on the timeless level had been taken? Was Jesus really talking about something which had already happened?

If it has been recorded correctly, Jesus evidently thought that it would happen in the lifetime of some of his companions. Some of them may well still have been living at the time of Titus’ siege of Jerusalem in AD 70, but, although this was a revolting siege according to Josephus, it was nothing to compare with the events which Jesus apparently foresaw.

I am well aware that many far more clever men than myself must have spent many hours thinking about this discrepancy and my suggestion may be offending a lot of people. Yet one must tell the truth as far as one sees it. In this particular matter there was an error, either in foretelling the future or in the recording of what was said.

The great trouble, which looks like the description of an atomic war, had either happened long before or was not going to happen for perhaps two thousand years. At least this theory appears to be the explanation of all the conflicting statements in the Gospels. It surely explains too all the difficulties, heresies, schisms and the like which follow all attempts to make a coherent picture of an imaginary interpretation.

If the avatar were omnipotent, then surely everyone would believe in him at once and the whole world would become a good and kindly place. Instead of that, rival variations of beliefs pursued one another through the ages with fire and sword. Jesus realized this and said it would happen: ‘I came not to send peace on earth but with a sword.’

To return to the problem of UFOs. They may be either contemporary visitors from some unknown planet or they may be the work of people, spoken of today as dead, living in a timeless zone above that of our own earth. The first supposition would have seemed utterly impossible before the days of H.G. Wells, but is today quite a commonplace idea. It may be difficult to guess what planet they might be coming from but no longer utterly improbable. Even with our primitive modern rockets, it is possible to see that the problems of long space travel might be overcome by any fortunate, or perhaps unfortunate, discovery in a comparatively few years.

The second idea would still seem fantastic to very many people who are still wedded to the concept of only one stage of living and that confined to the surface of a single earth. An earth with onion skins of different levels of existence cannot easily be grasped by people with a materialistic or rationalistic upbringing. Yet this idea would not seem particularly strange to advanced Buddhist or Hindu thinkers. The Buddhists with their ‘wheel of life’ are very near it but have not apparently as yet seen that the wheel is a double spiral. [2]

There are pointers to the occurrence of the second type of happening in the Bible itself, but since the witnesses who observed the incident clearly did not understand what appears to have been taking place, the orthodox interpretation is not particularly convincing nowadays. You can appreciate that much of the reporting in the Bible is true without believing a word of the dogma, which has been built up upon it through the ages. That is one of the difficulties today. Because of the incredibility of the dogma, people tend to throw away the baby with the bath water.

The two incidents which we must look at both concern ascents into heaven. The first is that of Elijah and is simply a traditional story somewhat dramatized by whoever wrote it down. The second is the Ascension itself and apparently a far more accurate account. But there is great similarity between the two stories. Not only that, but they are also very much like the dematerializations which are reported by Hindu and Buddhist sages to this day.

The Ascension is by far the most important and is entirely distinct from the vexed question of what really happened at the Crucifixion. At the Ascension a living man actually vanished in the sight of a large number of people. It is very hard to dismiss this as an account of a conjuring trick because it made such a great impression on those who saw it that it has not been forgotten for nearly two thousand years. Conjuring tricks are a commonplace in the Eastern world and had it been one, no such impression would have survived. The incident carried complete conviction. [3]

Having said this much, let us see what the Gospels appear to relate. I have taken the two following accounts from J.B. Phillips’ recent translations of the Gospels, but they are little different from the wording of the James I version:

'Then He led them outside as far as Bethany, where He blessed them with uplifted hands. While He was in the act of blessing them He parted from them and was carried up to Heaven.’ (St Luke)

'When He had said these words He was lifted up before their eyes till a cloud hid Him from their sight.’ (St John)

It is clear, I think, that the witnesses did not understand what had happened and the words ‘carried up to Heaven’ and ‘a cloud hid Him from their sight’ were added to the straightforward report in explanation of an apparently impossible event.

However, if we remember the numerous reports of ‘out of body’ experiences and the evidence of the spiral, it is possible to see what had happened. Jesus, a master of bio-electronic power, had simply accelerated his vibrations and moved up on the next whorl of the spiral. There, as we have already observed, he would be invisible to the watchers. There are numerous modern Hindu accounts of this feat being performed by their learned men and also of their subsequent return.

The whole Ascension story in the Gospels is claimed as the promise of human survival of death and, as far as one can judge, indeed it is, but hardly of the type of survival which is generally imagined. This is in itself a glorified picture of what was believed to be the most happy situation two thousand years ago. The harps and the songs and all the rest of it are a reflection of that bygone age, when a feast was the height of enjoyment.

The Elijah story may well have once been similar. In fact some Hindu experts believe Jesus to have been a reincarnation not of Elijah but of his disciple Elisha, who was promised a double portion of Elijah’s spirit if he could see him carried into heaven.

The point about Elijah’s aerial exploit is that it has been quoted in various works as evidence for the former existence of flying saucers. What actually does the Bible say?

'Elijah said unto Elisha, Ask what I shall do for thee, before I be taken away from thee. And Elisha said, I pray thee, let a double portion of thy spirit be upon me. And he said, Thou has asked a hard thing: nevertheless, if thou see me when I am taken from thee, it shall be so unto thee, but if not, it shall not be so. And it came to pass, as they still went on, and talked, that, behold, there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, and parted them both asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven. And Elisha saw it, and he cried, My father, my father, the chariot of Israel and the horsemen thereof. And he saw him no more.’ Authorized Version. 2 Kings, 2, verses 9-11

This dramatic story had probably been handed down by word of mouth for a long time before it was put into writing. The vehicle, if there was one, was indescribable and so spoken of as a chariot. A chariot had to have horses and they were added, quite reasonably. But nobody emerged from the chariot; although Elijah apparently knew it was coming. When it came he vanished in a whirlwind.

One can see how this story fits in well with modern accounts of flying saucers; but we are left with a doubt whether anything more than a dust-devil, or willy-waw, was ever seen. Elijah, an accomplished practitioner of ESP (or shall we call it magic?) simply vanished. How he went nobody, probably not even Elisha, ever knew.

I don’t know how it strikes others, but I personally suspect that Elisha had to say he had seen the chariot to explain his subsequent magic powers. One wonders too whether the scribe who wrote the story down was familiar with the Greek beliefs in which Gods flew about the heavens in chariots drawn by horses.

Whatever may have been the truth of Elijah’s disappearance, a feeling remains that it may have been very like the Ascension. Unfortunately there was only a single witness and there is quite a possibility either that he may have been biased in his subsequent account, or that the author of the second book of Kings was somewhat carried away by the drama of the incident. On the whole it does not seem possible to use this story as an argument in favour of the former existence of flying saucers.

When we turn to the problem of how anyone could possibly pass from one level of vibration to one of perhaps four times faster rate, we are humbugged by a lack of general knowledge. It is a problem well ahead of science at its present stage.

We do know that a living scientist today is not the solid object he appears to be, but is really almost entirely empty space, a series of holes joined together by French knitting. In fact he may only be there at all because somebody else thinks of him. In any case you could have dozens of different scientists fitted into the holes in the first one.

People used to think that they knew all about matter; but today they do at least realize that they hardly know anything at all. Matter may be energy, still what is that? Energy may be vibrations. What are they?

All that is really known is that if you do certain things, certain results will follow and the range of action in which the foreseeable results are known is very limited. It has not even begun to dawn on the scientific world that, by changing the rate of vibration, you might land bang in another scientific world much more advanced than your own.

As I said at the beginning, I am only putting up questions to most of which there is no known answer. I do not believe in the answers I have put forward, except to a very limited degree. For instance I do think that I have got the right method by which the bluestones were transported to Stonehenge. But I hope that it will provoke enough interest for others to try to solve some of the problems which are too difficult for me to answer.

In any case this is all imagination and we do not really know what unidentified flying objects may be: ghosts, hallucinations, time machines or honest to God visitors from another planet. Whatever they might be, they offer us an interesting subject for talk and speculation and the answer may come sooner than anyone expects.

I shall finish now. Many people will think it is all rubbish. Others will see some sense in it, even if I have produced no hard and fast theory. At least I hope I have given a few something to turn over in their minds, to see whether they can produce anything more satisfactory than I have been able to.

Endnotes

[i] Source: The Legend of the Sons of God (1972) by Tom Lethbridge included as Chapter 11 in The Essential T.C.Lethbridge edited by Tom Graves & Janet Hoult; Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1980, ISBN 0 586 05077 9.
[ii] In fact, as Jesus so rightly said, you have to ‘become again as little children’ and reorientate all your ideas from the start. This, thanks largely to the inventiveness of television script writers, children of today appear to be quite ready to do. It means little to them that people should jump about in time and place. I have quite a number of letters from teenagers who obviously have a good idea of the possibilities, although they tell me that their views are ridiculed by their elders.
[iii] I may seem unduly credulous here, but one must remember that very little history is in any way exact. As recently as the great battle of Jutland, when I was still at school, there was only one case of exact reporting. A boy seaman in a destroyer was made to write in the log the time and the exact bearing of every incident which took place. As a reward for this devotion to duty, the boy was taken ashore afterwards and given the best meal his heart desired at the expense of the destroyer’s first lieutenant. The lieutenant himself, the only man in the whole British fleet who realized the importance of a record, received no commendation at all, although he eventually retired from the Navy as a captain.

 

© Tom Lethbridge 1967 [1]

The problem of the stone circles and alignments is really one proper to the old world although others are known, particularly in Peru. The new world has others of its own. For instance, what are we to make of the remarkable animal mounds found in considerable numbers to the south and west of the Great Lakes? The Indians have no idea who made them and there seems to be little archaeological evidence for their date.

The largest of these appears to be the Great Serpent Mound of Adams County, Ohio. The mound is five feet high on a thirty foot base and if straightened out would be more than a thousand feet, say three hundred metres, long. The work necessary to produce a mound of this size is great and what possible purpose was it intended to serve?

Seen from the ground it is nothing but a bank. Only from above is its serpentine form obvious. It is the same with the tortoise, alligator, eagle, lizard, elk, bear, otter, wolf and frog mounds, while some apparently represent human beings.

When once the possibility of the stone circles and alignments of the old world having been used as beacons for aerial navigation has entered one’s mind, the same possibility can be appreciated with regard to the animal mounds of the United States. However, in their case the beacons would only be visual ones, unless there was some method of charging them with bio-electronic force. This is not so impossible as most people would think today.

Now I bring in a new puzzle, even if I seem to be involving the reader in the imagination of space travel. As before, I do not know the answer, but it is evident to me that an answer could be found and should be sought, even if the seeker may be greeted with ridicule by those who have not the imagination to look for it. Of course I refer to the huge and growing mass of statements, often by highly competent eye-witnesses, that strange flying objects are frequently seen in the sky. These are known widely now as UFOs, unidentified flying objects.

Now people may exaggerate and they may mistake what they think they see. I have seen photographs in the papers, which look as if they had been the shades of Tilley lamps and I have read accounts which were obviously distortions of the real facts. However there is a large residuum, which clearly needs an explanation. People as a whole report truly what they have seen to the best of their ability.

A recent announcement on the BBC News makes it obvious that something needs investigation. As far as I can now remember the radio said that the American Air Force was closing down a department formed to investigate reports on UFOs. They had examined thousands of reports of sightings and there were only about seven hundred which they could not explain.

Good heavens, could any official department expect to get away with that? Seven hundred unexplained cases of what might be visitors from another planet, and it was not worth the trouble and expense of trying to find out what they were! Suppose you had many reports that there were thousands of spies in your country and of these only seven hundred could not be shown to be innocent, what would you think of a government which gave up vetting them?

If correctly reported, this must surely be one of the most naïve announcements in history! I don’t know whether UFOs exist or not; but I do think that it is most important to find out whether they do. However, before talking more about these UFOs, let me return for a moment to the reports of wheels in the sky.

There may be nothing more in it than coincidence. Someone, being unable to describe it in any other manner, may call a revolving object a wheel; but it is at least curious that symbols described by archaeologists as ‘sun discs’ are by no means rarely found carved on stones of the megalithic and early Bronze Ages in western Europe. Sometimes they are simply a ring; again they may be a ring with a dot in the centre and, more curiously, a ring with a cross carved on it.

A sequence of these carvings, not infrequently found together with symbols for ships, is published from Brittany to Ireland and from there to the celebrated Swedish rock engravings. A case has been made out for the existence of a complete sequence of ship and sun disc symbols from Scandinavia to ancient Egypt. Frequently they are so crudely executed that without a knowledge of more perfect examples it would be impossible to interpret the pictures. But with a sequence available there can be little doubt what was intended by the carvers.

In the most celebrated burial cairn of New Grange on the Boyne in Ireland there is one of these symbols in the central chamber. No one would probably have been able to identify it without a knowledge of the Swedish and Breton engravings; but with this knowledge the intention is clear. Are these discs meant to represent the sun at all; or was the idea to picture the vehicles in which the gods were transported through the heavens?

For many years I have just taken it for granted that when the older generation of archaeologists talked of these things as ‘sun discs’, they knew what they were talking about. Now, as with so many other current dogmas, I am not so sure that they did.

Even if the ancient Egyptian symbol did come to represent the Sun God, Ra, and the boat in which he daily crossed the heavens, is this what was originally intended? Was not Ra himself one of the sons of God, venerated in later years as the great God himself?

Of course it would be much less trouble to leave it all unquestioned; to go on as if nothing had happened and nobody had ever reported seeing wheels in the sky, or photographed objects up there which could not be explained in terms of present day knowledge. But, if we have any real curiosity in our make-up, we cannot just shrug it off.

What we can say at this stage is that at the approximate time when men all over the old world were apparently beginning to venerate a multitude of aerial gods, they were also suggesting that they moved about the heavens in boats and things with or like wheels.

Through the ages these gods took on varying characteristics, but this was doubtless due to frequent repetition and downright invention by priestly castes, whose job it was to keep the beliefs in being.

All this too was imposed apparently upon a set of earlier beliefs in which men had a tribal totem in the form of some animal. The combination of the totem animal with gods in human form who flew about in the heavens produced some very curious creatures indeed.

Although I am not qualified to do so and have no real personal experience of the matter at all, I must try to make some estimate of how the problem of the UFOs strike me as an ordinary member of the populace.

I look on it with a completely open mind. I neither believe nor disbelieve. My object in writing this book is just this, to stimulate people to think, observe and experiment for themselves and not just swallow the sayings of the authorities of the time as if these were the Word of God.

However I do have one article of faith and that is that a witness should be believed until he can be shown to be either lying or mistaken. The answer so often returned to a report on the supposed sightings of a UFO, that it was the planet Venus, has added to the general popular disbelief in the announcements of specialists. Next to the sun and moon, Venus has always been the most well-known object in the night sky. One of the first questions asked by children when shown the darkened heavens is: “What is that bright star?”

When, in addition, the supposed specialists have on occasion claimed this well-known object to have been the cause of a report and it has been shown that the planet was not above the horizon at the time, one’s doubts of the specialists’ qualifications rise considerably.

In fact the frequent mention of Venus and the recent statement from America that there are about seven hundred reports which they have not been able to explain, convinces me that there is a case to answer. Either there is something to hide, or the authorities are completely stupid; one remembers Bernard Shaw putting into the mouth of a foreign politician: ‘For God’s sake don’t frighten the British.’ Now it should be changed to the ‘Americans’.

For obviously if there are people capable of flying here frequently in large machines from outer space, they would also be advanced enough to flatten America, Russia, China and the whole caboodle had they wished to do so.

The reports on the size of these objects vary very much, but all agree that they are often much larger than the present day aeroplane and that they travel at much greater speed. They can also change their course at right angles to the line of flight which no earthly plane can attempt to do.

Accounts of the lighting of these machines vary considerably. They may appear as silvery discs in daylight or glow with different colours at night. They may also, when seen fairly close at hand, appear to have a ring of windows or ports which emit bright light.

There are a fair number of reports that these machines have been observed to land and also that humanoid figures have been seen to emerge from them. It is doubtful whether any of these reports can be taken at their face value. However it seems possible that some of them may be true.

I rather discount the accounts that observers have talked to persons emerging from these things and messages on the soles of shoes seem most improbable. If any conversations have taken place, which I doubt, they have not been recorded in such a way to carry conviction.

If visitors from elsewhere wished to make contact with people on earth, it does not seem probable that they would do so in American deserts or waste places in Scotland. Since they apparently can operate the machines at far greater speed than any earthly aeroplane, it would be reasonably safe for them to land openly on some civil airfield.

But they have been chased, so the reports go, and apparently attacked, with dire results to the attacker. There seems to be little doubt that these things have been picked up on radar screens and that warplanes have been sent up in pursuit; but whether this has only happened in America is not disclosed.

The term ‘flying saucer’ is not so inaccurate as anyone might suspect. A fair number of photographs appear to show large objects in the sky, not unlike a saucer with a rim facing downwards, but on what should be the base of the saucer there appears to be a small tower and something like a short mast. Seen from below these objects appear as discs and so we come to the description of ‘wheels in the sky’.

There are many reports of these things flying in formation and in quite considerable numbers. By that I mean you might observe eight or ten at a time. There are also reports of giant cylindrical mother ships on which the saucers home and into which they return. As far as I know there are no reports of such things from Britain, although there are several from France. More than one saucer is also not common in this country.

Of course all this rigmarole seems very improbable to many people and quite incomprehensible until this century. But students of the subject have noted that it is nothing new and that there are accounts at various stages of history, which could well be taken to refer to the same type of object.

Pride in the achievements of modern aeronautics and conceit in the intelligence of people on earth make it hard for most to look at all this objectively. For so long a time has humanity been taught that it is the highest product of nature that it is difficult for it now to believe that some other organism somewhere else might be more advanced. But this is not improbable at all. In fact it is more probable than not.

There are a few other significant points. For instance, it is not uncommon for it to be reported that the passing over of a saucer stops the magneto of a car, which in itself suggests some very powerful electronic device in operation.

Then some observers, including policemen in South Wales, have apparently observed a succession of saucers diving into the sea. They were well scolded for their pains!

Other policemen on night patrol in Devon have chased apparent UFOs in fast cars and been told that they were observing planes refuelling in the air. I am sure they did not believe this explanation. Policemen have to be good observers.

There are accounts, too, of filaments of unknown substance falling from these machines and known as ‘angel’s tears’. No one appears to have been able to collect and examine any samples. However ‘angel’s tears’ was the name given by German children to the fine silvery ribbons dropped by our planes during the war to deflect the German radar. I have seen plenty of these ‘angel’s tears’, but do not know of what metal they were composed.

This is a very brief summary of what appears to be known about a very curious subject. There are a host of books available from which the reader can attempt to form his own ideas. However, I think that it must be a very dull-witted person who does not want to know the answer. Is a very large proportion of humanity suffering from delusions or are we really having visitors from outer space? If the second is the right answer, what are they coming for?

The Russians are a hard-headed and incredulous breed, but years ago they let it out that they believed they had found evidence that there had been visitors from outer space. Of course they have also announced that some of their scientists had chased what we should call a Loch Ness Monster in a motor boat. This is another subject which is anathema to our orthodox zoologists.

Nether account may be true. We have no means of checking them. But here is a curious point; if either the Russians or the Americans had any doubt that the things were coming from elsewhere, one would surely have accused the other of infringing their air space. Both must have been having the same kind of visitors, or hallucinations, and they know it.

It is interesting too that both countries are working hard to find out the facts of extra-sensory perception or bio-electronics. They both hope to be able to talk by telepathy to people in rockets on the further side of planets which cannot be reached by radar. In our investigation then we appear to be chasing something which is cloaked in layer upon layer of official secrecy.

However, there is another school of thought with a far more original idea. This school believes that the visitors do not belong to our time at all; but are people living in the future who will have invented machines which are capable of coming back down the ages to see what was going on at a given time. We will now see whether we can conceive any possibility that this might be true.

However we must note that, in the event of it being correct, there is clearly no possibility that people in flying saucers could ever have been thought of as the sons of God or have fathered children on the daughters of men. They could only have been something resembling ghosts to the people in whose ages they appeared, for they would be on a different level of vibration, with no bodily functions comparable to the people they went to investigate. At least this is how the situation would appear to me with my very limited knowledge.

However if we remember what the pendulum has told us of future time and the second level of existence or vibration, there is much to be said in favour of this explanation of the appearance of flying saucers. Interest in the past is very widespread today and appears to be growing. It would be completely fascinating to be able to go back and see exactly what really went on in bygone ages. [2]

The ways that saucers are reported as remaining stationary in the sky for hours at a time is what you would expect if a party was examining a particular place at a particular period of time. The casual way in which only some people see them, while others do not, suggests that they may not be visible to anybody who does not have a high vibrational rate himself. In fact they are future ghosts if this explanation is correct.

We need not boggle at the word ghost. A ghost is something out of its normal earthly time sequence. All recorded television pictures are ghosts. They appear absolutely real on your television screen, but they are not there at all. Neither would this hypothetical type of unknown flying object be real in the sense that your breakfast is real. It would be something completely upsetting to what is called our ‘space time continuum’. But many upsetting things are always happening nowadays, so why not this.

This moving between two levels of existence, however, does not seem to demand any vehicle of transport. Our lady magician, who claimed to visit us in the night, also stated that she often talked with people living on the higher level. I asked her one day whether she could find out from her friends what flying saucers were. A few days later she returned with the answer: ‘They told me that they were made by the back-room boys. I asked them why and they said it was the kind of thing the back-room boys liked to do.’

I have no idea what degree of reliance to put on this statement. But if, by any chance, the saucers were the mechanical toys of experimenters on another level, it would explain why only certain people see them. There is no reason to suppose that men’s mentality would change after reaching the next level. Since everything else, but time, appears to be there, people with a mechanical bent might well experiment in many ways, and only those with a certain degree of psychic ability on this earth level would be able to see the results.

In one way this theory ought to be a considerable encouragement to the numerous people who work themselves into a fret through expectation of the destruction of humanity in an atomic war. If people are coming back from the future to look at us, there can have been no universal destruction before their time.

Still, once again this is not necessarily correct. The visitors need not be coming from the earth plane future. They may be people living on the second plane itself and be what is in earth terms described as dead. Of course if you have a rigid belief that life is confined to one short phase on earth, there is no point thinking about this possibility at all. But this is only a dogma and really the antithesis of any scientific outlook.

You do not know the answer and your belief is on a par with that of the moon being made of blue cheese. It is known that the composition of the moon is rock and not cheese, while such evidence as there is appears to point to the conclusion that life continues to infinity.

If it does, and people continue to live on a higher vibrational level on the next whorl and even on others above that, then presumably they might at times use the intelligences they had brought with them to study the past of the level which they had left.

They are not in the time sequence and not in the earth body, but it might be easier for them to lower their vibrations and even get out of their machines than people from the earth level itself. Have they ever done this? If they did, could they have had real personal contact with the earth humans they met on their trips?

Endnotes

[1] Source: The Legend of the Sons of God (1972) by Tom Lethbridge included in chapters 9 & 10 in The Essential T.C.Lethbridge edited by Tom Graves & Janet Hoult; Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1980, ISBN 0 586 05077 9.
[2] Should the construction of such machines become possible, they might well become subject to commercialism. You could hire a seat in a saucer to watch the building of a pyramid or the Battle of Marathon. hey would be of the greatest value in the study of geology and for estimating the probable changes in climate or sea-level. In fact they would be of considerable importance in many ways.

 

© Tom Lethbridge 1967 [1]

I had been interested in the problem of who were ‘the sons of God’ for many years and had sought enlightenment from archaeologists, anthropologists and theologians at Cambridge and elsewhere without getting the slightest satisfaction. Nobody knew the answer.

If my ideas had any sense in them, nobody could have known the answer before the present generation, for travel to other planets was unthinkable. Since this has now changed, it is obviously time that people did begin to think about these matters which clearly affect the whole meaning of life on earth. Is there more than one species of Man and is he found on many different planets?

I could not be expected to know the answer, of course, but it is worth throwing a stone into the pool to see what then moves in it. My wife, who is my great helper and best critic as well as carrying the burden of typing it all, seems to think I am not crazy in formulating these ideas and so I will throw the stone and hope for the best.

Let me quote three verses from the sixth chapter of Genesis and see whether anything we have heard of really provides an answer:

'And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives all which they chose.’

That was verses 1 and 2. Then follows verse 3 which seems to have no connection with the first two; and after that verse 4 takes up the story again:

‘There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.’

Now how does this piece of legend fit in with any known ‘ism’? It is not totemism, anthropomorphism or anything of that kind. It is a definite statement of fact that a race known as the sons of God intermarried with another known as the daughters of men. But who were the sons of God? This problem has puzzled me for years and I have met no one who can supply an answer.

There is the same kind of thing in Greek mythology where one race is apparently described as Gods. They have unions with mortal women and produce heroes. One finds it, too, in the northern lands. Many of our early Anglo-Saxon kings claimed to be descended from Woden, the same Odin of the Norsemen, who was the equivalent of the Greek Zeus, the chief of the gods.

Let us forget such terms as polytheism and see whether there is any other explanation which might fit this seemingly impossible situation. After all there are many people who believe that every word in the Bible is true and to them the sons of God must mean, not only that God had children, but that He also had a wife.

When I first thought abut this matter, it seemed obvious that the sons of God must have been some conquering race who thought a lot of themselves and to whom it was at first unthinkable that they should actually intermarry with the people they conquered.

The whole caste system was apparently based on such a situation. The race, formerly known as Aryans and now generally spoken of as Indo-Europeans, thought it sinful to mix their blood with that of the people they had vanquished. But they had gods of their own. If they had been or believed themselves of divine descent, they would have surely been called the ‘children of the gods’. Aryan appears to mean ‘noble’ and nothing more.

This problem is not entirely foreign to us in England. Very large numbers of people are known to have descended from Edward III. Edward III was descended in blood from Alfred. Alfred claimed descent from Woden. Are all these people then entitled to put ‘son of God’ after their name?

Of course, it sounds ridiculous when said like that but, funny or not, it is interesting to wonder whether they might be. Who was Woden anyway? Was he just the wandering chief of a barbarous war band, or was he something else?

So much difficulty lies in the meaning of words. A god to ancient Romans could be simply an outstanding man and he could be deified in his lifetime. We all know the unpleasant results of this process when Herod was hailed as a god by the populace! The practice of calling Roman emperors gods is also well known. It may appear strange to those who hold that the term only refers to the creator of the universe, but as a matter of historical fact it needs to be considered.

It is even more strange to find that the term ‘devil’ is simply a distortion of a word meaning ‘god’. The gods of one religious belief became the devils of another. Lucifer, the light bearer, a god to many races (including the Celts, who called him Lugh), was also the wicked angel who was thrown out of heaven.

Perhaps it is even more peculiar to learn that the original holder of the Greek title was the planet Venus and so female. Lucifer, Satan, devil, the dragon and the serpent all came to mean the spirit of evil, not only in the Christian world but in many others also, which brings us to the second curious puzzle: What was the war in heaven?

Unless the meaning is very obscure, I far prefer the language of the old James I Bible to that of the modern ‘told to the children’ versions and I think that there is nothing obscure in the following quotations which all bear on the same subject. The first is from Revelations, chapter 12, verses 7 to 9 and is the most complete statement of what was evidently, at the time of Nero, a very ancient legend.

‘And there was war in heaven; Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not; neither was there place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called e Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world; he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.’

Also in St Luke, chapter 10, verse 18, Jesus himself is reported as quoting: ‘I beheld Satan as lightning fall from the heaven.’ These are not unique survivals in old Hebrew writings, for something similar is preserved by the Hindus, while the serpent or dragon is even found in old Norse mythology. There was a story spread widely in the ancient world that there had been a war in heaven and the vanquished side had been driven to live on earth.

Of course it is possible to reject anything of this sort as pure imagination by men long ago seeking for an explanation of the reason for the conflict between good and evil. In almost every ancient religion of which we have record there is this story of conflict between the powers of light and darkness.

The ancient Greeks did not have it, but then their gods were quite frankly ‘not respectable’ in a Christian sense; neither were those of the Romans, Saxons, Norsemen or Celts. These had all the vices as well as many of the virtues of mankind. They were simply men and women with greatly enlarged powers.

If we take the view that all legends of this kind are no more than fiction, there is no point in going on with this study; but as the years go by, it becomes increasingly clear that many, if not all, have some foundation in fact. They may be greatly embroidered and appear as fairy stories, but there is something in them based on memories of events which really happen.

They are not the same as myths, which are the counterparts of religious ritual; although these themselves often contain genuine pieces of tradition. The long labours of Sir James Frazer which resulted in that ponderous series of books known as The Golden Bough brought this home to many readers. Tradition itself tells that he was locked up in his study for many hours a day by his ferocious French wife to compel him to write his daily quota. Certainly he seemed to wear a haunted look.

I am going to take it for granted that there was some truth at the back of the two scraps of legend which I have quoted and see whether we can find anything to suggest an explanation. It is a kind of exercise in detection, but it is not fiction. The guesses may be wrong, yet there is something to be investigated.

Our questions then are: Who were the sons of God? And what was the war in heaven?

If anybody reads the early chapters of Genesis with care, it becomes clear that some editor has linked together at least two traditional accounts of the Creation with remarkably little skill. The Adam and Eve story is the kind of thing you might find in the religious beliefs of an African tribe today and we need not bother with it yet. However the other, which in itself looks like a blend of more than one tale, has a lot of legend in it.

At the very start of this we meet another puzzle in Chapter 1, verse 26: ‘And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.’ Who did God say this to? We have always been led to understand that there was only one God and that He was absolute. He created everything from millions of nebulae and bacteria. Yet in the chief religious book of the early Hebrews he is pictured as talking to other of like form. Were they perhaps the sons of God? One can hardly assume that He was talking to Himself.

It is even more remarkable when we find a similar kind of story preserved on the other side of the Atlantic. There several descendants of God are reported as having more than one trial at making man like themselves. There were also failures of the same kind as described in Genesis. This is some world-wide traditional story and not confined to the Hebrews. It seems most unlikely that it is more than some ancient theory, but at the same time we must observe that it had once a very wide distribution. How was it spread from one continent to another before the days of efficient ships? There is a puzzle here which is not just a bee in my bonnet.

The question of who the Sons of God might have been is bound up somehow with the evidence for an extraordinary spread of people all up the western seaboard of Europe who put up a very great number of large upright stones for some apparently inexplicable reason. Single ones are perhaps not of very great interest, for they might mark the site where someone had been killed, or be the boundary between two different communities.

But when you find great rings and lines of stones set up in Brittany, Cornwall, Wiltshire, Ireland, the Outer Hebrides and the Orkneys, it surely means something of vast importance to the people who put them up. No one has the least idea why great rows of stones were set striding across Dartmoor, or why a huge ring was erected at Stennis in Orkney.

Only one thing is obvious and that is that a race of seamen must have done it for an important purpose. Why do seamen put up marks? As far as I know it is only for one purpose and that is to show themselves or other seafarers how to get to some place in safety. But many of these indicators are far inland and could not be seen from the sea at all. Although the suggestion may seem fantastic, could it possibly be that they were meant to be seen from the sir?

No, I am not crazy, but although I have had no personal experience of the matter, I cannot fail to be impressed by the bulk of testimony that unidentified flying vehicles are frequently observed in our skies. Could it be that, in the Bronze Age, and before, they were also numerous and needed direction points?

Let us go back to the ancient Greek gods. Till the second half of this century, it would have been quite absurd to suggest that there might have been some truth in the flying chariots which the gods possessed and the thunderbolts which Zeus threw. Furthermore it would have been ridiculous to think that these gods might have come from an unknown part of the universe and sometimes begotten children on women of the earth.

It is no longer absurd - clumsy though our efforts may appear to be, man is already starting on his first tentative exploration of other planets and is there any reason to be sure that he is the first race to do so? Obviously the answer is ‘no’. We have really very little idea of what may go on in outer space and it is an impertinence to think that man on Earth is the most advanced of all creation.

The Greek gods passed with great rapidity from their home on Mount Olympus to anywhere they wanted to go and if they were said to go in flying chariots, this only described the fastest things that man had by that time invented. It was all rather fantastic and even a little comical, but why did men believe anything of the sort unless sometime, somewhere, something of a vague resemblance to this picture had once existed?

It was not only a product of Greek imagination, for there were Hindu stories too, of godlike personages who actually had remarkable flying machines and destructive weapons. Nobody knew how they worked, of course, and it was all long ago. So was the chariot of fire, which took Elijah up into the heavens.

I do not believe all this, of course, for there is very little to go on; but I do think that there is enough to make us wonder whether there is a possibility that for a short period long ago there may have been visitors to this earth from another and that they were so relatively advanced in technology as to be completely bewildering to the earth men of those days.

If there were visitors of this kind, it is more than likely that they would need landing signs here and there. Supposing that they were beginning to investigate an unexplored world, which was completely unmapped and they were putting down a few parties of explorers, it would be necessary to have indications where these parties had been dropped. What would be more natural than to enlist native help to set up such marks?

It is hard for us today to visualize the Britain of, for instance, five thousand years ago. The vast extent of natural woodland is unknown today, except in tropical vegetation. Brambles and fallen trees made pathways through it extremely difficult and it covered the bulk of the country. Only on some downlands was passage relatively easy and that was not free from large patches of juniper trees, thorn bushes, gorse and bramble.

The wide vista of rolling grassland did not exist. One can assume that exploration parties would be dropped at the edges of all this and traces of them would be found, if at all, in the kind of situations where we do find these stone set rings and alignments today. A stone ring would be noticeable from the air, just because such things do not often happen in nature. Neither would straight lines be frequent.

But there may have been another reason for setting up the stones, even if its object were the same. For untold generations it has been believed, especially by the devotees of the old witch religion, that by means of exciting people to execute wild circular dances, power could be generated and stored in stone and trees.

Actually this appears to be scientific fact. It has been demonstrated by Mr P Callahan in America that moths generate bio-electricity by the heat caused by the movements of their wings and they use this to locate their mates or food supply. I have described how I detected the same thing with beetles in an earlier part of this book. This is observed fact and no longer something on the fringe of knowledge.

Now if you have a large number of people dancing wildly round in a ring, you obviously generate a great deal of this bio-electricity, living electricity. If you carry out this performance in rings formed of stones with gaps between them, you have a form of dynamo.

It has been shown that the electro-magnetic fields of stones, trees and water will absorb bio-electricity from outside and this is the probable reason why some people see ghosts in situations which were favourable to such impressions being preserved. I have elsewhere suggested the names of oread fields for those of stones, dryad fields for those of trees and naiad fields for those of streams in accordance with the Greek belief that nymphs with these names were to be found in such places.

We now apparently see why my wife and I experienced electric shocks when trying to date the stones of the circle of the Merry Maidens in Cornwall. The bio-electronic force has been stored at one time by the exertion of dancers in that circle and it had never been taken out again. The circle is still complete. But why did anybody wish to store up electronic power in such places? What possible use could it be put to?

Well, experiments with the pendulum have shown that the electronic fields about an object are double cones of limitless height and depth. It has also been shown that a pendulum length of the same radius as the base of the double cones ill register contact with that cone.

If, then, you had an apparatus in a flying machine set to the right wave-length, you could pick up the rays from the stored energy in the stones and home in on it like the moth to its mate. These rings of stones could have been used both as visible and invisible navigational beacons.

This suggestion sounds absurd to those who have got no further than believing that the stones were set up by shaggy and uncultured savages whose only aids to life were stone tools and soft, badly baked pottery. But what if there were two completely different races of people involved, the sons of God and the daughters of men?

Of course, I may well be talking complete rubbish, but before the reader dismisses it as such, perhaps he will tell me why the stones were set up at all. In the whole of western Europe, it used to be done and in the same area the excited ring dances were once commonplace. No one can give a reason for either.

When explorers get up tributaries of the Amazon, they find the naked women of unknown tribes dancing in exciting rings in forest glades. It is no answer to say that primitive man does this as a primitive religious rite and you did it in a sacred circle of stones or trees to make it more religious.

Or children do it naturally and so it is a natural form of worship. But do any children do it unless they are first taught by some elder who has herself been taught as a child?

What were the dances of Baal which so upset the Hebrew prophets? The Baalim were little stone jujus of the gods and the people danced before them to put power into the stones. The One God, Yahweh, was not supposed to like it.

It was not only the Hebrew prophets who had this trouble. If you read the Koran of the Moslems, you find that Mahomet had the same difficulty with numerous godlings. We may think perhaps that these Baalim represented the sons of God, but with the passage of time nobody really remembered what that meant.

As a purely hypothetical exercise then, let us put up a probably absurd problem. Was there a long time ago, perhaps five thousand or more years it might have been, a series of exploratory visits to this world from another? Did they have considerable contact with the people then living on earth, including some degree of intermarriage?

Did the explorers persuade the natives to help them in setting up direction beacons and similar constructions in return for being taught how to work metals, practise agriculture and even build primitive towns? Then, for some unknown reason, did it all come to an end, leaving some degree of hybrid population behind it? Were the visitors known as the sons of God, because they had a belief in a single deity?

I think it is impossible to imagine a large immigration of people from elsewhere. Had there been anything of the sort and had settlements been formed of foreigners, it seems impossible for no trace of them to have come to light. So much digging and construction work has been done that some totally unknown culture of objects must have emerged somewhere for the acute bewilderment of archaeologists. This has not happened.

There are stories published of a very few unknown things being found in rocks, but until I see a numerous collection of such things I shall not believe it. Archaeological study is really quite advanced and I think we can say with confidence that no such foreign culture has come to light.

You may say that Atlantis, Mu and even Tartessos have not yet been found and I say we have no vestige anywhere of any Atlantian culture, which must have existed, other than on the drowned lands, if there had been one. The Atlantis at present claimed at the eastern end of the Mediterranean cannot be right, because Atlantis was outside the Pillars of Hercules, that is west of Gibraltar.

If it existed at all, one would have thought that the shoals off Cape Trafalgar might mark its grave. Yet the only unexpected things dredged from the bottom of nearby Cadiz harbour are Irish bronzes, and Irish goldwork has been found as far away as Palestine while Greek and Egyptian ornaments have been found in Bronze Age graves in Britain. People got about the world all right in those far off days, so where are the traces of the Atlantians who are said to have been so far advanced that they had flying machines?

Perhaps, however, Atlantis was just another explorers’ base and quite small. If so, there might be very little to find except the equivalent of the empty bully beef tins of the explorers of my day. At least we buried these out of a sense of decency, now lacking in the bulk of our population, even in the wastes of Jan Mayen or Baffin Land.

This investigation becomes more and more complicated as it goes on. Nothing seems to have an obvious answer and yet all sorts of books are written and hundreds of lectures given about this very period, none of which gives us much hint of the astonishing things which have taken place in a raw, new world some five thousand years ago.

Endnotes

[1] Source: The Legend of the Sons of God (1972) by Tom Lethbridge included as Chapter 9 in The Essential T.C.Lethbridge edited by Tom Graves & Janet Hoult; Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1980, ISBN 0 586 05077 9.