Fact is stranger than fiction

They say that fact is stranger than fiction, and so it is. Sometimes, however, fiction prefigures fact in quite startling and unexpected ways.

In 1994 Robert Bauval and I wrote The Orion Mystery: the book which has proved to be the inspiration for a whole new appreciation of the pyramids. Unknown to us at the time we were writing it, Hollywood was busy making a film called "Stargate". When this came on the big screen, a few months after the publication of our book, we were surprised to see that it linked the pyramids with star-maps. More specifically it talked about Orion. As the film was being made at the time we were writing "The Orion Mystery", there could be no question of plagiarism. This was clearly a case of synchonicity. Little did I realise though, that this film would unconsciously prefigure images from a future book of mine: "Signs in the Sky".

"Signs" is all about discoveries I made subsequent to the writing of "Orion". I realised that these days the sun is placed directly at a so-called "stargate" on the summer solstice: June 21st. This is not always so and was not at the time the pyramids were built. The sun's position in the zodiac at the solstice depends on a slow cycle called the "Precession of the Equinoxes". These days, and for the next twenty years or so, it is positioned exactly over the upstretched "hand" or Orion, at the precise place where the ecliptic (path of the sun) crosses the median plane of our galaxy, the milky way.

In the ancient world, this position, right on the cusp of Gemini and Taurus, was regarded as one of two gateways to heaven (the other is in Sagittarius). I called it a "stargate" as the Egyptians used a symbol of a man cupping in his hand a star to represent Orion. Their hieroglyph of a star (called S'ba in Egyptian) had the dual meanings of "star" and "gate". Their Orion hieroglyph therefore emblemised very precisely the idea of the stargate over the hand of Orion.

Now last night they showed the film "Stargate" again on British television. (We also get the TV series "Stargate SG-1" but I am not talking about that. This was the original film). In the film a young Egyptologist, Daniel Jackson, is challenged to work out the meaning of certain symbols. Six of these are Star positions, giving the co-ordinates of a planetary counterpart to Earth. The seventh is a symbol for where we stand in relation to it. It was of a pyramid, with the sun standing on top and a praying man on either side of it.

It was this image, which I hadn't taken in before though I saw the film ten years ago, that had me nearly falling off my chair. For one of the discoveries I made whilst researching Signs in the Sky was that the angle of slope if the Khafre or Central Pyramid of Giza is precisely right to align with the stargate at the summer solstice.

Today if a viewer stands at the foot of the pyramid on the western side on the day of the solstice, he or she will see the sitting on top of the pyramid at the precise moment it crosses the east-west azimuth. At that moment the pyramid casts no shadow. This happens in the morning. In the afternoon the observation is reversed and the same thing is seen by a viewer standing on the east of the pyramid looking west.

I was so astounded when I made this discovery in theory that I had to go and see if it was true in practise. Thus it was that in June 2000 I took a party of people to observe the sun over the Khafre pyramid on the solstice. I called this event "Opening the Stargate" and using a large ankh, symbolically opened the pyramid and invoked the New Age.

Little did I realise that what I was doing was re-enacting the symbol portrayed in the film "Stargate" that in a curious way was prophetic without its makers, I think, realising it. I was acting out the seventh symbol, in reality, on the day the sun was aligned with the "stargate" in the sky.

Things haven't been the same for me since!