UFO ROUNDUP
Volume 7, Number 16
April 16, 2002
Editor: Joseph Trainor
THE SPHINX OF AQUILONIA!?
A MYSTERY IN FRANCE
In the south of France is a curious landform called Monte Sainte-Victoire, which overlooks the city of Aix-en- Provence. This mountain, which appears in 12 oil paintings completed by the celebrated artist Paul Cezanne, has now become the focus of a keen debate in the New Age community. Namely, is the mountain a badly-eroded Sphinx, similar to the one in Giza?
"On a hill to the north of Aix there is an archaeological site known as Entremont dating from a pre- Roman period. Its inhabitants were Celto-Ligurians, and this site was the capital of a tribe the Romans called the Salyens."
"Here archaeologists have found 'traces of an advanced civilization with shops, warehouses and workshops and also a large building through to be a shrine.' The settlement was located on the end of a rocky peak facing (Monte) Sainte-Victoire, which was sacred for them, for they identified it with their wind god Vintour."
The mountain was sacred to Cezanne, too. According to Meyer Schapiro, the artist "identified with it as the ancients with a holy mountain on which they set the dwelling or birthplace of a god."
According to writer William Glyn-Jones, "One unavoidable conclusion to be made about this particular view of the mountain: it looks like a sphinx."
"With extended forepaws, well-developed chest muscles, arched back, well-defined head and even raised haunches, the likeness to a feline is uncanny, and upon closer examination, we discover something even more extraordinary..Zooming into a photograph taken just before an August sunset, we can see, exactly where it should be, a truly colossal feline face."
Glyn-Jones continues, "Oddly enough, a theory has already been put forward by Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval that there may once have been a second Sphinx. They also suggest that the Sphinx (in Giza, Egypt), being of far greater antiquity than generally recognized, originally had a lion's face, and that a pharoah of a much later period saw fit to have his own mug carved out of the sandstone."
"The name of the Sphinx is Hor-em-Ahket, and scholars have translated this as Horus of the Horizon, and I've also seen it as Horus of the Two Horizons. Horus was a name of the sun god, not to be confused with Horus, the sun of Isis and Osiris. As a sun god, he was god of the two horizons, namely the east of sunrise and the west of sunset."
"'The doors of the sky are thrown open at dawn for Horus of the East,' say the Pyramid Texts, and the Giza sphinx has its face lit by the rays of dawn. But what about the second horizon, that of the west.
"Hancock and Bauval have gone as far as to suggest that there was originally a second Sphinx facing west, and they draw attention to Egyptian depictions of two sphinxes facing in opposite directions in The Keeper of Genesis."
"Could it be that the guardian of the western horizon was the Provence Sphinx at the western end of the Mediterranean, whose face is made visible by the rays of the setting sun? The Akeru, twin lions seated back-to- back with the sun's disk supported between them, formed an important motif in Egyptian culture.
(Editor's Comment: True enough. I've seen a photograph of two small back-to-back Sphinxes at Luxor.)
"Evidence has come to light suggesting that in 'prehistory' there was a strong link between Egypt and the Magdalenian culture which flourished in southern France prior to 9,500 B.C." In addition, "The Magdalenians are certainly known for hyper-realistic depictions of wildlife in their cave art, and in that era France was home to the likes of rhino, mammoths and wild cats such as lions."
"During the last Ice Age, the Mediterranean was much shallower than it is today, as the oceans' water was locked up in two-mile high (3,000-meter) ice sheets. In the last three million years, there have actually been about 36 ice ages (glaciations--J.T.) and if the Mediterranean was dry during any of these (My old geology professor, Dr. Fellows,said it was--J.T.) then we have an explanation for the link between Egypt and the south of France. The Nile could have flowed along the bottom of the (Mediterranean) basin before joining with the Rhone (River) and exiting into the Atlantic via the straits of Gibraltar. Egypt would then simply have been upstream."
It is also possible that the Magdalenians, led by a prehistoric counterpart of Gutzon Borglum (the sculptor who carved Mount Rushmore in South Dakota during the 1930s--J.T.), chiseled Monte Sainte-Victoire into a second Sphinx.
As New Age writer Robert Charroux points out, the Magdalenians were more advanced than people think. In The Mysteries of the Andes, Charroux wrote, "The Magdalenian, the period of Lascaux, Altamira and Lussac-les-Chateaux, is said to have been at the end of what prehistorians call the most recent ice age. Since they supposedly lived in an 'ice age' it might be assumed that they were warmly dressed in furs. But not at all: they wore hats, jackets, trousers, socks, shoes, belts and robes...Some of them had carefully combed hair, others had 'crew cuts' and some wore moustaches and goatees, all of which shows an esthetic concern that is hard to reconcile with the conventional view of them as cave dwellers, half-human and half-animal."
French prehistorian Stephane Lwoff has published sketches of Magdalenian III people from the walls of La Marche cave at Lussac-les-Chateaux. These include a "bald, bearded Magdalenian man" who "looks more like a philosopher or an orator than a club-wielding brute;" a prehistoric princess who looks like Britney Spears; and a Magdalenian woman sitting on a bench. Of her, Lwoff wrote, "With what looks to us like a sailor's waterproof hat on her head, this woman is completely dressed. There appears to be a pocket on the right leg of her trousers, over her thigh. A sole is clearly visible under her foot."
(Editor's Comment: I've seen Mme. Lwoff's sketch. The Magdalenian woman's garb is quite similar to the clothing worn by peasant women in the Dordogne Valley as recently as 1789.)
Strangest of all, the novel Hour of the Dragon (retitled Conan the Conqueror in 1950) by Robert E. Howard contains a fleeting reference to a Sphinx is "Poitain, the southernmost province of Aquilonia," now the south of France. Forced into exile and beginning a long quest to find a talisman that will enable him to defeat the evil wizard Xaltotun, Conan reins in his mount and sees a silent Sphinx on the horizon.
(Editor's Note: Aquilonia was Robert E. Howard's made-up name for the France of his "Hyborian Age," about the same time fame as the Magdalenian period. Where he got the notion of a Sphinx in southern France, only Crom knows.)
"In the last years of the Twentieth Century, a new discovery was made near Avignon , also in southwest France (i.e. the same region as Monte Sainte-Victorie) The Chauvet cave complex is as awesome as the one at Lascaux, in fact even more so. It is also 13,000 years older, having been dated to between 29,700 to 32,400 years ago. Its impressive artwork includes studies of the faces of lions, as well as bears, rhinoceroses, and a total of 14 types of animals, including an owl. The lion's face shown reveals a great sensitivity, reminiscent of the face on Sainte-Victoire."
Perhaps it's time to consider what was previously thought to be unthinkable--that some sort of Bronze Age- type civilization existed in Europe before the last Pleistocene glaciation over 10,000 years ago.
(See Atlantis Rising Number 33 for May-June 2002, "The Sphinx of Aix-en-Provence" by William Glyn-Jones, pages 27, 28, 63 and 64. Also The Mysteries of the Andes by Robert Charroux, Avon Books, New York, N.Y. 1977, pages 82 and 84.) |
