When I took Art at School, in the mid-80s, we were given a ‘theme’ for the exam piece. On this occasion it was ‘Sun Worshippers’. Having already developed an interest in the Ancient World, I, therefore, ‘looked back’ for ‘inspiration’. It ended up as Egypt vs Meso-America, and I opted for the latter. Though the preliminary sketches, like the final painting, are sadly no longer extant, I recall the image vividly. At one end of a huge, paved plaza, bounded on three sides by buildings or colonnades, stood a building similar to the one pictured. Like the central platform of the Oseirion, Abydos, and the sarcophagus in the so-called ‘Tomb of Osiris, Giza, it was ‘moated’.

Barbara Clow, in Signet of Atlantis wrote about crystal that concentrated light from the cosmos to Earth [the parentheses are my notes]:

“a diamond light receiver that reflected rainbow beams off its inner planes - a dense crystal of star matter [from Sirius] that traduced laser beams from the galactic center... . Whether sunlight shines on the diamond or not, inner facets still shine with light from the stars.”

A deeper insight of how this process works is given by Robert Temple in his superb The Crystal Sun. He discusses the idea of Philolaos, a Pythagorean philosopher [5th century BC], that “the Sun shines as a crystal.” Temple says Philolaos’ “three suns” theory in fact describes “three stages of sunlight”. In other words, “one body, but three light phenomena associated with it”:-

1) “ambient light exists around the centre of the cosmos...”
2) “the crystal sun gathers it in and refracts it towards us...”
3) “that refracted light then travels from the crystal body to the earth and our eyes... . We only see the third stage,...the light which actually reaches us.”

The crystal atop the pyramid, I feel, fulfilled a very similar function to the ‘Crystal Sun’. But what the light gathered and focused was used for, I’m not sure. Was it an ancient form of solar power? Or was it, as Clow inferred, an actual “receiver”? According to Clow the “iron crystal” in the Earth’s core was used by Atlanteans to “read” photons. These “conciousness particles...freed from cosmic locations” crossed space bearing “the latest cosmic news.” Yet, she said this information could only be deciphered within Earth’s “electromagnetic atmosphere.” Sitchin’s The Stairway to Heaven has several images [my versions are below] of “a circular beaming device mounted on a post”. The Gilgamesh Epic said it had a more sinister purpose, as a “dreaded spotlight that sweeps the mountains.”

This calls to mind the scene in the Well of Souls in Raiders of the Lost Ark, involving a disc on a staff. The Staff of Ra is placed in a hole by Indiana Jones, and, at the correct time, sunlight passing through a crystal in the disc’s centre creates a beam. [The staff’s height is given in an inscription on the disc.] This ray indicates, on a model, the relative location of the Ark of the Covenant in Tanis. Below are two intriguing images that suggest Spielburg’s idea of the Ark in Egypt may not have been entirely fiction. Ramses II plundered Jerusalem in Year 8 of his reign [925 in David Rohl’s New Chronology].

Recently, I read H. Warner Munn's King of the World's Edge [1939]. In it the narrator details a ceremony in Nachan, the City of the Snake in Tlapallan, called after its serpentine rampart symbolising "Ciocoatl, the Devourer, the Earth-Mother" [pg. 88]. The sacrificial ritual is performed by the Mayan deity Kukulcan and the H'menes, the Priests of the Sun, to ensure that the Sun rises again. It takes place on top of the Egg, an ovoid flat-topped mound between the Snake's "jaws". At the end of the ceremony, as the Sun sets, the Sacred Fire is lit on the altar. This is done with the Sastun "a perfect crystal used in focusing the Sun's rays upon tinder" [pg. 96]. From the Fire "all others in the city will be relit" [pg. 92]. The Sastun is probably a Crystal Skull. Clow wrote about a Crystal Skull in the Mayan Temple of the Four Directions [aligned to N, S, E and W]. It rested in a stone basin on a 3 ft high plinth in the middle of an egg-shaped stone chamber, and was a hologram projected by a ruby.