Review of "Talisman: Sacred Cities, Secret Faith" by Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval

Intending to write a book "to uncover the traces in architecture of a secret religion that has shaped the world," instead Hancock and Bauval (H & B) wrote the book on obfuscation. They've given us no new pieces to the puzzle, merely refitted existing pieces in a slightly different way, and after 486 pages, withheld a cogent idea as to the completed picture's content.

H & B's latest offering drags readers onto a disjointed, verbose highway where the circuitous routing of information never achieves a cohesive closing. Name-recognized authors certainly owe readers a more insightful interpretation of historical data, and, at the very least, a better job of editing.

Almost 200 pages into the book, the most "provocative" (their word choice) finding they could offer was that there is a close link between Egyptian, Hermetic, and Gnostic religious beliefs. Yet how can any discourse on the links associated with sacred cities or religions be considered provocative unless there is at least a cursory reference to the Sumarian culture. More than likely, everyone who's read H & B has read Zecharia Sitchin, so their failure to reference Sitchin is telling. Should "Talisman" be considered fully researched and well-rounded with this kind of gap? By not addressing a pre-Egyptian link to the "secret religion," are we meant to think there wasn't one? Certainly their research indicated otherwise. Why didn't they present those findings? The book leaves way too many unanswered questions.

Another interesting omission in "Talisman" is that though they've striven to list every common denominator they could find in shaping world events, they did not include Milo Rambaldi or Leonardo da Vinci.

Rambaldi and da Vinci were alive at the same time as C. Rosencreutz, and they likely had occasion to communicate in both Rambaldi's function as chief architect for Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia) and da Vinci's function as military engineer under Cesare Borgia. As most of you know, Rambaldi's and da Vinci's notebooks contained detailed schematics for inventions which preceded their time: binary 'machine code,' as well as cell phone and transistor design (Rambaldi), and breech loading cannon, submarines, and helicopters (da Vinci).

These two geniuses shared the goal of "preserving the chief gift of Nature, which is Liberty" -- they seem to have similar ideologies as Bacon, Wren, and the numerous other Freemasonic thinkers H & B reference. So very likely they would have played a role in shaping, staging, and actualizing the movement of the "invisible" brotherhood.

Also missing from H & B's "Who's Who" of history is R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz who, many agree, wrote the definitive explanation of Luxor Temple's raison d'etre in "The Temple of Man: Apet of the South at Luxor." Lubicz shows that a symbolic directive was operative in the architecture of the Temple of Luxor such that the function and scale of every facet of the temple corresponded with both human and celestial bodies.

Here are a couple of 'alternative' theories that are equally as plausible as H & B's: could Francis Bacon have found some of da Vinci's and/or Rambaldi's lost documents and passed them off as his own; or more provocatively, could Bacon/da Vinci/Shakespeare, etc. be the same person in a continued line of identities delineating from Thoth, Hermes, Moses, etc. Thoth was said to be immortal, having arrived in Egypt from Atlantis under the guise of Chiquetet Arlich Vomalites. Egyptian born Ahmed Osman claims that Moses of the Bible is no other than King Akhenaten who ruled Egypt for 17 years in the mid-14th century BC. Sigmund Freud was the first to argue that Moses was in fact an Egyptian.

One could easily draw the inference of Thoth's immortality from Andrew Michael Ramsay's "carefully chosen words" in his "Oration" in 1737 where he said, "Freemasons attribute great antiquity to the Brotherhood by ascribing 'our institution to Solomon, some to Moses, some to Abraham, some to Noah and some to Enoch who built the first city, or even to Adam.'

The "Brotherhood" might actually have originated with Tat, Thoth's son, who formed the Tat Brotherhood which was assigned to closely monitor the Egyptians and reseed the knowledge of Atlantis. There are examples of this stair-step evolution in Egypt and Sumeria -- all of a sudden the people just know everything about a certain subject (astronomy, etc.) All Hancock is willing to go on record with is: "Hermes Trimegistus, the alter ego of the ancient Egyptian wisdom god Thoth. . ." That says nothing. If Thoth and Hermes were linked closely enough to share an ego, might not they be the same person? As I mentioned, we get no new insights from "Talisman."

Another example of H & B's skimming the surface is their interpretation of Isis' astro-geographical statement in this quote from the "Kore Kosmou":

"The earth lies in the middle of the universe, stretched on her back as a human might lie facing toward heaven . . . Her head lies toward the south . . . her right shoulder toward the east, and her left shoulder toward the west; her feet lie beneath the Great Bear [North] . . . But the right holy land of our ancestors [ i.e., Egypt] (H & B's interpretation) lies in the middle of the earth; and the middle of the human body is the sanctuary of the heart, and the heart is the headquarters of the soul; and that, my son, is the reason why men of this land . . . are more intelligent [wise]. It could not be otherwise, seeing they are born and bred upon Earth's heart."

The "middle of the earth" could just as easily be the area on either side of the equator, especially when one takes into account that 16 ancient sites are located along the latitude of 19.5 degrees within a margin of error of less than one tenth of one degree of latitude http://home.hiwaay.net/~jalison/ including the Great Pyramid, Easter Island, Machupicchu, Perseopolis, Ur, and Nazca. It's generally agreed that these structures were not built by local people for local reasons. Rather, there is a single global pattern that ties these monuments together. This in turn implies the existence of an advanced civilization that existed before the flood and managed to communicate important geodesic, geological and geometric information to people throughout history.

In "The Geometry of Ancient Sites" http://www.earthmatrix.com/ancientsites.... Charles William Johnson expands these thoughts, expressed earlier by Carl P. Munck in "The Code," into the idea of a matrix where the Great Pyramid, along with all the other pyramids of different ancient sites, are situated so as to maintain the proper revolution and rotation of the Earth on its cosmic orbit within our solar system.

A final example of H & B's almost Masonic (secretive) interpretation of data is their limited look at Campanella's City of the Sun plan that showed seven concentric divisions ringing the temple separated by walls penetrated by gates facing the cardinal directions." H & B make no reference to the almost identical layout of the City of Atlantis, as described by Plato, nor the fact that the Minoans and Cretans used the flat record of the seven strips off the torus, the labyrinth, to dance the dance of remembering -- as Dan Winter explains in "Alphabet of the Eartheart" (available free on-line at http://spirals.eternite.com/ ).

Winter's book examines alphabets within historical context, pointing to the medieval kabbalists of southern France as the initiators of a one source geometrical letter shape tradition. Using this tradition as a base line, the book also develops the idea of an alphabet of symmetry as a way to create resonant coherence across dimensions or realities (possibly how the Invisible College/Rosicrucians were able to "be fluent in many languages and to possess their own magical language and writing"). The letter shapes of this phase-angle alphabet are mapped off a Phi-ratio shaped torus by a Phi-based spiral.

In passing, H & B remark that Fourier visited Egypt, but they make no mention of Fourier's significant contributions. Thanks to the Fourier transform, we understand that all shapes are woven of sine waves. And in a world made only of waves, there would be just two basic geometric forms, the torus and the golden mean spiral. A sine wave spun into 3D is a torus. Stan Tenen, Dan Winter, and Vincent M. Bridges ("Sacred Waveform Alphabets: coherence, consciousness and the kabbalah") have concluded that all sacred alphabets (like Hebrew) have some sort of geometric symbolism which underlies their sound.

According to Tenen, "the text of Genesis can be looked at like a woven structure, where meanings are seen in the pattern, beyond just what the words spell out. This structure is like a software program that once activated in your mind can be a path to a higher view or enlightenment, he explained. Biblical Hebrew is an 'acronym language' where each letter can be read as a word, and each word as a sentence." (Tenen's book "First Hand: The Geometry of Genesis and the Alphabet" will be available in 2005.)

But getting back to the book's biggest failure -- editing. Flailing through the wordy forest H & B have created, a forest in which a quarter of the trees could have been spared through judicious deletion of repeated passages, the reader's progress is thwarted by the downed limbs of fragmentation (between pages 200-204 for example, there are independent tales about Alexander the Great, Helen of Troy, Isis, Stella Maris, Cleopatra, Paris, then back to Alexander -- with no thread of continuity); the dead-ends of minutia (who cares about a donkey's size, or a one-time mentioned eunuch's being forced to swallow his own poison, etc.?); and repetition (after more than 20 times of being warned that a major repetition was about to follow ("as the reader will recall from Chapter _"), this reader stopped counting). Although the flow improves after Chapter 11, it may be too late by then.

Unless, of course, future big-screen adaptation drove the minutia and repetition issues. The made-for-movie aspects of the book are most obvious in the chapters devoted to beyond-belief detail of the Inquisition horrors. Why grind the reader's eyes so intently into the reality that the Catholic Church was indeed the bad guy throughout most of history? Why belabor the horrific details when a one-time statement about the Church's culpability would suffice?

It's difficult not to deduce that H & B are out-of-touch with their audience. Which begs the question: who is their intended audience? It appears it's their peers based on H & B's heavy reliance on Frances Yates for validation throughout "Talisman."

Forsaken as a casualty of their directed effort at mollifying and persuading their peers toward a favorable consideration of their theories, are whole generations of truth seekers. Even if a GenX'er were to make it through the first chapter, he/she would give up, saying, "It's like, why didn't they just flip-flop the chapters -- it would have been more interesting?" Today's readers require two things: innovative substance and conciseness. H & B offer neither in "Talisman". Aside from the book's color plates, this book leaves the reader feeling shortchanged at £20 a pop.

Not due for release in the U.S. until early 2005, there's still time for damage control. Unless editors for the next edition take mercy on readers who scourge themselves to stay awake so they can read an entire chapter, and let history come alive through more logical flow and less repetition, "Talisman" is destined to find its niche alongside the myriad other approximations of truth produced through the ages by Catholic Church/Illuminati-filtered versions of history offered by mainstream historians.

Most literate people are well aware that "there are major discontinuities in the historical record which have severely distorted and 'edited' the data about the past" -- "Talisman" does nothing to change our opinion. If we learn anything from this book, it's that perhaps we've stumbled upon the master plan for humanity -- which is a concerted effort to fragment knowledge to the point of frustrating the masses into begrudgingly accepting the status quo on this over-populated, resource-deplenished planet -- just as "they" (the conglomerate establishment watchdogs embedded in the top echelons of politics, media, education, science and religion) intend.

Perhaps Hancock and Bauval are so steeped in history that they've forgotten that it's the 21st century -- it's time to courageously take alternative history to the next level -- not simply rehash relatively 'safe' theories. Quantities of up-to-the minute scientific, archeological, astronomical, quantum physics information are at today's gnosis-seeker's fingertips. Most of today's truth seekers can fit the puzzle pieces together less randomly and more insightfully than H & B were able to accomplish -- like author David Icke's done in "The Biggest Secret" where he bravely traces the "secret society brotherhood" back to ancient Babylon.

Or Umberto Eco who in "Foucault's Pendulum" makes fiction seem factual by determining that what every major society of Europe, from the thirteenth century onward, has wanted -- Templars, Rosicrucians, Masons, Jesuits, even Nazis, -- is control of the Earth's 'telluric currents,' the energy grid that circles the planet. The pre-Celts built Stonehenge; the Gothics erected immense cathedral spires; Eiffel contrived his tower. Why? "What need did Paris have of this useless monument? It's the celestial probe, the antenna that collects information from every hermetic valve stuck into the planet's crust!"

Tracing religious links has proven over the centuries to be a dead-end -- religion has failed to provide humanity with serious answers to probing questions. Knowing this, H & B should leave the tracing of religious links to the rookies and concentrate on more likely possibilities about why humans are on this planet -- like tracing bloodlines (some think sacred sites are coded to respond to blood biology -- not technology), or the stargate capabilities of ancient sites, or geometry as a communication vehicle (crop circles, the fact that all the "sacred sites" on the planet are laid out in either logarithmic or Fibonacci (Golden Mean) spirals, mathematically connected and delineated back to the area in Egypt called the solar cross, according to Thoth); or frequencies -- anything but religion.