Forbidden History: Prehistoric Technologies, Extraterrestrial Intervention, and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization

17 Megalithic England: The Atlantean Dimensions

A Conversation with John Michell

J. Douglas Kenyon

Among those who have argued in their writings that there was once a great and shining, albeit forgotten-to-history, fountainhead of civilization whose ghosts even now continue to haunt us, few have been more eloquent than John Michell.

The author of more than a score of works on ancient mysteries, sacred geometry, UFOs, unexplained phenomena, and the like, Michell is familiar to American readers primarily through his visionary classic The View Over Atlantis (a revised and rewritten version of this book, published in 1995, is entitled The New View Over Atlantis). The Earth Spirit comprises Michell’s profusely illustrated essays on the ways, shrines, and mysteries of the subtle animating forces of the planet and their near universal celebration since the dawn of time.

Michell argues that across much of the earth are ancient earthworks and stone monuments built for an unknown purpose, and that their shared features suggest they might be part of a worldwide system that he believes served the elemental science of the archaic civilization that Plato called Atlantis. Michell suggests, in this connection, that the most significant modern discovery is that of leys, a mysterious network of straight lines that link the ancient places of Britain and have their counterparts in China, Australia, South America, and elsewhere.

In The New View Over Atlantis, the Cambridge-educated scholar’s vision of a high megalithic civilization with a mastery of principles far beyond present-day understanding is so thoroughly and beautifully worked out that it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to credit orthodox notions that the sources of our megalithic heritage were but Stone Age hunter-gatherer societies with little on their primitive minds but survival and procreation. In detailed descriptions of phenomena such as the precise terrestrial and celestial alignments of ancient monuments along long ley lines, advanced ancient sciences of numbers and sacred geometry, and sophisticated prehistoric engineering, Michell paints a picture of a vast and coherent worldwide order beyond anything imaginable today.

“We live within the ruins of an ancient structure,” he wrote in the first edition of The New View Over Atlantis, “whose vast size has hitherto rendered it invisible.” Emerging from current research is the awesome image of an ancient structure so great that its outlines have heretofore escaped understanding, one patiently awaiting our ascent to a sufficient height whence its masterful design, stretched out beneath us, can at last be appreciated.

Colin Wilson described The View Over Atlantis as “one of the great seminal books of our generation—a book which will be argued about for generations to come.” In an interview with Atlantis Rising, Michell was asked if he had been keeping up with the new research by Graham Hancock, Robert Bauval, and others into celestial alignments of the monument of Egypt’s Giza plane with the constellation Orion and other stars. He has, and hears an echo of evidence he has found in British sites in “much older stone,” where alignments with significant stars also indicate the route of the soul after death.

“Everywhere in the ancient world you see this terrific obsession with death, reflected in the orientation of monuments,” he observes. To him it seems plain that the ancients possessed a kind of science of immortality along the lines that Graham Hancock has suggested.

Unlike Colin Wilson, who theorizes that the ancients possessed advanced psychic faculties but had no technology as we understand the term, Michell believes it is very clear that they did. He sees it in their elaborate work of siting and constructing monuments well before the pyramids, and he sees it in their highly developed sciences of numbers and geometry.

“It’s truly just extraordinary that so many numerical harmonies are put into basically very simple structures,” he marvels, “and how they designed others to concentrate on the long term. In this very beautiful pattern is implied the kind of philosophy that says we can construct, here on Earth, the path to the heavens.” He cites the frequent use of the number 12, as in the twelve tribes of Israel and a connection with the twelve signs of the zodiac, hinting at an attempt to order life on Earth according to the pattern of things in the heavens.

The question of technology becomes more pressing, but even more difficult to answer, when one considers how the giant stones of ancient sites were actually cut, tooled, and moved. “It is a mystery, actually,” he concedes, “this incredible precision. And again in megalithic times, the extraordinary weights involved—raising blocks of one hundred tons or more, transporting them, and setting them up. They used terrific labor ingenuity and, no doubt, principles that aren’t recognized today.”

Could such principles have included some kind of levitation? “There are very persistent references from the Classical writers to the power of sound,” he says, “of the use of song and music and tone to make things lighter, work songs where there’s a rhythm got up, where you can move things without a lot of effort.”

Whatever lost secrets the ancients may have possessed, Michell believes that we can recover them and, in fact, will, when the time is right. “Human ingenuity is such that we can do anything we want. If [the ancient knowledge] was actually needed, then it would return again. There’s no doubt about that,” he says. As to the suggestion that we may have been left hidden caches of records such as the legendary Hall of Records in Egypt, he thinks it very likely that such treasure troves exist, but is not certain we will recognize them when we see them.

“Plato went on about a certain canon of law possessed by the ancient Egyptians by which numerical proportions and musical harmonies, which dominate a society, enable it to continue on the same level for literally thousands of years,” he explains. “Ancient civilization lasted far longer than we can conceive of today, so it seems to me that the whole society was based upon an understanding of the harmonies by which the universe is laid. And acting upon these by corresponding rituals, and that sort of thing, could hold the society together through crises.” However, he concedes, being sufficiently developed to appreciate the wisdom of such laws may be another matter.

The possibility that we may have begun, at least in some quarters, to resonate in harmony with the ancient chords of wisdom could open the door to a return of ancient wisdom. In religious stories such as the Revelation of Saint John, Michell sees the description of a “New Jerusalem” coming down ready-made through a parting of the heavens as the manifestation of an awakening and a wholesale change from the patterns of a previous age.

Such a revelation comes, he believes, from nature, and “it is invoked,” he says. “When we need it, we ask for it and it comes. Today, when people are so uncertain, I think we are looking for a truth and understanding that is beyond this world of chaos—of secular theories, and of all the scientific theories that follow one after the other but never establish anything—we’re looking for the higher truth that is always there. When we ask for that, we’ll get that.”

In a chaotic world where dissonance and dissonant music apparently reign supreme, there seems little hope that such a force can be overcome, but Michell remains optimistic. “It will overcome itself,” he says. “Certainly it has always been recognized that music is the most powerful of the arts. As Plato said, forms of government eventually follow the forms of music. That’s why the ancients were very careful in controlling music—no cacophony was allowed. The same music was heard at festivals every year and people were held under a kind of enchantment [whereby] the mind was held under one influence.

“Music is by far the most powerful means for therapy. Certainly the music—and the other art forms too—that we see now threatens chaos in society. It’s a vessel that not only reflects what happens but also actually determines what will happen. As to what will come about, I have no idea. I think more and more it’s in the hands of God and that there is now working out an alchemical process and that changes come about through nature—through the natural process of cause and effect. Things are chaotic and we have a reaction and a yearning for a source of order—there’s a quest for that and an invocation of that, and then there follows a revelation.”

Can the hoped-for change come without cataclysm? “Every man-made thing, every created thing comes to an end sooner or later,” Michell says. “It’s as inevitable as tomorrow’s sunrise that all these fruits shall have lain down. That which is artificial does not last long. Look at the fall of Communism. It seemed so assured, so completely in control, and it vanished practically overnght, destroyed by its own inherent contradictions. People just couldn’t stand it anymore. It’s so like the description of the fall of Babylon [in Saint John’s Revelation]. One day it’s going with all its wealth, parading its splendor, and the next day it’s as if it never had been. There is no doubt that all the institutions we know will collapse. As to how orderly this process will be? The further we go into megalomania and dependence on artificial systems, the more drastic will be the reaction.”

Michell sees a clear parallel between the destruction of Babylon described in the Book of Revelation and Plato’s description of the fall of Atlantis, and he believes the story is a warning about the danger in certain ordering: “Plato made it very clear he’s describing a geometrical pattern, the ground plan of Atlantis, which is actually not adequate—like a man-made thing—based on the number 10, where his ideal city was based on the number 12. He saw in Atlantis the mortal element prevailed and it collapsed . . .

“It is about an error in the foundation law,” Michell says, “which became more and more exaggerated and eventually led to the downfall of the whole thing. Life is bringing us through this process of revelation what was not even conceivable one hundred years ago or less—the idea of there being a cosmological pattern expressible numerically, geometrically, beautifully, which is the best possible reflection of the cosmos. That process establishes perfect patterns in one’s own mind and then later on becomes the pattern for society.

“Then, of course, again over many generations, what began as a revelation becomes the iron law and becomes unjust and leads to that process whereby the ideal turns into Babylon and is fit for destruction. The best possible cosmological pattern that is kept up in the institutes of society will enable the society to last for a very long time, but no material thing lasts forever. Eventually it turns into dust.”

But the good news, says Michell, is that human nature will always outlive any system of tyranny imposed upon it and, like the phoenix, will rise again. Today, he believes, we are living like bats in the ruins of a haunted house among the relics and ruins of the past, not just physically but also mentally, caught in outmoded forms of thought. If one is going to free oneself from the age-old spells, Michell says, one must challenge the dominant myths as he once did, with the most dominant theory of biology, evolution.

“It’s not exactly that they are wrong,” he explains. “It’s that they are partial and arbitrary. That’s the way they teach in school and college. You have to challenge them to get anywhere near adjusting your mind to the reality of things. If you take to heart anyone’s scientific explanation, you will have an uneasy life: for, as you know, the theories that are portrayed as certainties are always changing. If you believe what they tell you in school now, by the time you get to be my age you’ll be very old-fashioned indeed.”