From Atlantis to the Sphinx
by Colin Wilson

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Book Reviews of From Atlantis to the Sphinx

Book Review: THOUGHTFUL AND EXCITING SUMMARY OF ALTERNATIVE IDEAS
Summary: 5 Stars

For instance, he does not buy into Sitchen's idea that our solar system contains the planet Nibiru from which the Gods of Sumer came to create mankind. But he accepts much of Sitchen's remarkable scholarship on the Sumerians. He is impressed with Hapgood's data on the shifting location of earth's poles and the evidence he gathered from old maps that there was once a highly developed civilization on earth that has been forgotten. Cremo and Thompson's classic Forbidden Archeology is an insightful and amazing read, as they pile up evidence over 1000 pages showing mankind may be millions of years old, and Wilson uses their examples. Wilson provides colorful "back stories" about these authors, since he has met many of them personally.

There is purpose to Wilson's long discourse on the ideas of other authors; he delivers the goods in the end when he gives up his own fascinating theory of ancient Egyptian society. Wilson's narrative leads us to see that mankind may once have had a different way of seeing reality, the same kind of seeing as the shaman exercising "magic" rituals. He invites us to consider the Collective Mind, consciousness acting in consort to achieve some end, much as birds move in a flock. Conscousness can be concentrated to build up power and this can be expended as a physical force. How did the ancient Egyptians move those giant blocks of stone to form the pyramids? Could they have used their own collective mental power?

It is fascinating to me to read of feats that should require a huge expenditure of power (like moving giant blocks of stone), but are somehow accomplished without any application of normal means of power generation. Consider the testimony of Douchan Gersi (an interesting author NOT mentioned by Wilson) who wrote about the "flying men" of Haiti who could dematerialize in one location and rematerialize in another. There was no technology involved. Did mankind once know how to use another kind of power, one based on group consciousness? We sometimes enter this consciousness, which we identify as "peak" experience, when we seem outside linear time, and reality somehow is altered.

Wilson is telling us that because our conscousness has evolved in a different direction from our remote ancestors, we fail to grasp how they accomplished tasks like building the pyramids. He does not see teams of sweating slaves, or ridiculously long ramps, or ancient fork lifts, but simply the collective power of human consciousness working for common purpose. Wilson, as usual, entertains while building a well-documented case for his own unique alternative view of human history.

Summary of From Atlantis to the Sphinx

Recent discoveries of ancient water damage to the Sphinx have thrown the scientific world into a tizzy with the suggestion that Egypt's legendary monuments might be thousands of years older than previously believed. In his astonishing new bestseller, Colin Wilson delves into these explosive new findings and takes us on a grand tour of the knowledge amassed by researchers over the centuries. He explores mysteries that have puzzled humanity since Plato: Was there an ancient civilization, destroyed by a great catastrophe, whose survivors built the Sphinx some 10,500 years before Christ? Did they possess a knowledge system that could orchestrate the transport of stones weighing thousands of tons, an accomplishment that still baffles modern engineers? Wilson's tour takes us to the cave paintings of the Cro-Magnons, the tortuous interior shafts of the pyramids, the Upper Amazon, and the Gilbert Islands, touching on sources from Robert Graves's The White Goddess to the I-Ching, to get to the ultimate nature of human consciousness.

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