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Before the Sphinx

In one of the most important pages of The Dance of Life, Edward T. Hall describes how one of his students decided to film children in a playground.  To avoid making them self-conscious, the student filmed them from an abandoned car.  When he viewed the result, at first it seemed disappointing - just children playing.  But after repeated viewing at different speeds - which was part of the technique taught by Hall - he observed that one lively little girl seemed to be affecting everybody else in the playground.  As she skipped and danced and twirled, her rhythms seemed to be conveyed to every group she approached.

After watching it dozens of times, the student began to sense an underlying beat, as if watching a kind of ballet.  Moreover, the beat struck him as familiar.  He called on a friend who was a rock enthusiast, and asked him to watch the film.  After a while, the friend took a cassette from a nearby shelf.  When played alongside the film, the children seemed to be dancing to the rock music, as if it had been specially written for them.  “Not a beat, not a frame, was out of sync.”

THE DANCE OF LIFE

What had happened, Hall thinks, is that the children were playing and dancing to some basic musical beat of life, which the composer had also “plucked out of the air of time.”  Which is why Hall uses for this chapter the title of the whole book The Dance of Life.  There is, he believes, some basic rhythm of life - a quite definite rhythm, which could be defined in musical terms - to which our modern left-brain awareness is deaf.

Now this, clearly, is what Schwaller is talking about in the chapter on Sacred Science called Magic, Sorcery, Medicine.  “The higher animals, as well as the human animal, are totally bathed in a psychic atmosphere which establishes the bond between the individuals, a bond as explicit as the air which is breathed by all living things...every living being is in contact with all the rhythms and harmonies of all the energies in his universe.”

HIDDEN HARMONIES

But is there a way to turn this rather vague and abstract statement into something more concrete and down to earth?  After all, harmonies and rhythms can be measured in the physicist’s laboratory, and described in terms of amplitude and wavelength.  Can we not be more precise about them?

This is a question which, almost by accident, came to preoccupy an ex-advertising salesman named Michael Hayes.

Ever since late childhood - spent in Penzance, Cornwall, where his mother owned a hotel - Hayes had been preoccupied with the question of why we are alive, and what we are supposed to do now we are here.

In 1971, at the age of 22, he went to live in Mashad, Iran, where his brother was in the senior management of an international trading company.  These were the years before the Shah was deposed, when Iran was still swarming with hippies.  During his seven years in Iran, Mike Hayes - as he prefers to be known - took the opportunity to travel to India, Pakistan, Khatmandu and Afghanistan.  It was during this time he was introduce by a hippie friend to the ideas of Gurdjieff - via Ouspenksy’s In Search of the Miraculous - and began to think more purposefully about the basic problems of human nature.

In Mashad he had been deeply impressed by the great mosque of Imam Reza.  It was obvious from the sheer number of worshippers, and their devoutness, that for them religion was a living reality, as it had been for the cathedral builders of the Middle Ages.  And travelling in India and Pakistan, where he had a chance to come into contact with Hinduism and Buddhism, he again had this sense of the tremendous vitality of the religious tradition.  It took him by surprise for, apart from hymns at school and an occasional visit to church, his childhood had not been particularly religious.  The sheer size of these religious territories impressed him, and the effect of the religious founders on their followers...  “I decided that there was definitely something supernatural about all this.  Whoever they were, these ‘saviours’ of mankind certainly knew how to make their presence felt.”

THE DOUBLE HELIX

Back in England, he felt that it was time to catch up on his situation, which he could now see had been less than thorough.  He signed on for a course in extramural studies at Leicester University, and it was there he attended some classes on DNA and the genetic code.

DNA is, of course, a thread-like material in living cells which carries genetic information, such as whether a baby is born with brown or blond hair, blue or brown eyes, and so on.  It transmits this information by means of a code, which was finally cracked in the early 1950s by James Watson and Francis Crick.  They showed that  the DNA molecule had a spiral structure, and looks rather like two spiral ladders held together by rungs made of four chemical ‘bases’ called adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine.  These bases are strung together in what looks like a random order - perhaps AGTTCGGAA - but it is the order of these bases that makes the difference between brown and blond hair, etc.  When a cell splits into two - which is how it reproduces - the ‘ladder’ comes apart, and each half attracts itself to various molecules of the bases that are floating free, until there are now two identical ladders.  This is how living things reproduce themselves.

It was when he learned that sixty-four is the number in which the four bases can form into triplet units called RNA codons that Mike Hayes had a vague sense of deja vu.  Sixty-four awoke vague memories.  The same things happened when he learned that these codons correspond with the twenty amino acids necessary for the manufacture of protein - but since there are also two coded instructions for ‘start’ and ‘stop’, the basic number is twenty-two.  This again seemed vaguely familiar. 

SIGNIFICANCE OF SIXTY-FOUR

Then he remembered where he had come across the number sixty-four - in the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes, which is used as an oracle.  And the basic unit of the I Ching is, of course, a ‘triplet’ of lines, either broken or unbroken, corresponding to the principles of Yin and Yang, which might be regarded as darkness and light, or the male and female principles, or the moon and the sun.

Hayes recalled that when he had studied the I Ching in his hippie days, he had wondered vaguely why the number of its ‘hexagrams’ (each one made up of two trigrams) should be sixty-four - eight times eight - and not seven times seven or nine times nine.  And now he learned that each of the triplet units of RNA links up with another triplet in the DNA molecule.  So the ‘double helix’ of information in the heart of all reproductive cells is made up from sixty-four hexagrams, as in the I Ching.  Could this really be just coincidence?

Since his extra-mural course left him with time to kill, he began looking more closely into this ‘coincidence’.  Of course, it seemed unlikely that Fu Hsi, the legendary creator of the I Ching, had stumbled upon some kind of mystical insight into the ‘code of life.’  But it seemed worth investigating.

If this was not coincidence, then there should be eight trigrams hidden in DNA.  And when he had learned that this was so, Mike Hayes began to feel that he had stumbled upon something that could be very important indeed. 

MYSTICAL SEVEN

Then he recalled where he had seen the number twenty-two.  This was nothing to do with the I Ching, but with Pythagoras, the Greek ‘father of mathematics.’  The Pythagoreans regarded the number twenty-two as sacred because it represented three musical octaves, and the Pythagoreans saw music as one of the basic secrets of the universe.  Of course, an ordinary musical scale has seven notes - doh, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti - and a final doh of the next octave completes it and begins the next octave.   But three octaves - and the Pythagoreans attached a mystical significance to the number three - begins on doh, and ends on another doh twenty-two notes later.

Mike Hayes had played the guitar since his early teens, so he knew a certain amount of musical theory.   In the quest that followed, it proved to be of central importance.

But at this early stage, in the late ‘70s, a suspicion was beginning to form in his mind: that these numbers involved in the DNA code might express some basic law of the universe.  He was in the position of Edward T. Hall’s student  who realised  that the children in the playground were dancing to some basic rhythm of life, a rhythm that is totally unsuspected by the rest of us.  Mike Hayes came to believe that rhythm is basically musical in nature.  And this, in turn, meant he was a kind of Pythagorean. 

THE THIRD FORCE

Pythagoreanism is sometimes called ‘number mysticism’, and Pythagoras attached great importance to the numbers three and seven, and to the laws governing musical notes.  Gurdjieff had also spoken of the ‘Law of Three’ and the ‘Law of Seven.’  The Law of three states that all creation involves a third force.  We are inclined to think in terms of dualities: positive and negative, male and female, good and evil.  Gurdjieff - who derived the idea from the Sankhya philosophy of India - stated that instead, we should try to think in terms of three.  Positive and negative merely counterbalance one another, but if anything is to come of them, they must be given a push by a third force.  An obvious example would be the catalyst in a chemical reaction.  Oxygen and sulphur dioxide do not naturally combine; but it passed over hot platinised asbestos, they form sulphur trioxide, from which sulphuric acid is made.  The platinised asbestos remains unchanged.

Another simple example would be a zip.  The left and right side of the zip need the fastener in the middle to make them combine.

But perhaps Gurdjieff’s most interesting illustration is of someone who wishes to change, to achieve great self-knowledge, and in whom the forces of laziness act as a counterbalance.  In this case, the breakthrough can occur through knowledge - a perception of how it can be achieved, which brings a new drive and optimism.  In other words, the  third force is a kind of kick, an outside force that alters the balance of the situation, breaks a deadlock.

The Law of Seven is illustrated by the seven notes of the musical scale; here the final doh somehow draws them together so they can move to a higher octave,  just as the seven colours of the spectrum are drawn together into white light.

When Mike Hayes began to study the major world religions, he was stuck by how often the numbers three, seven and twenty-two recur.  The legendary founder of Hermetic philosophy - identified with the Egyptian god Thoth - is known as Thrice Great Hermes.  The number pi - the relation of the diameter of a circle to its circumference - which was supposed to have been discovered by Pythagoras, is twenty-two over seven. 

DECIPHERING THE ARK

In the story of Noah’s Ark, Noah is told by God to build an Ark and take on board two pairs of every animal and bird.  After seven days it begins to rain.  When the flood starts to subside, Noah sends a raven to see what is happening.  It fails to return, and after seven days, he sends a dove, which is unable to find land.  After another seven days, Noah sends the dove again, which returns with an olive branch in its beak (the olive branch which has become the symbol of the most important of third forces - reconciliation.)  After another seven days he releases the dove again, and this time it fails to return, having found land.

Those who know their Bible will recall that there seems to be a contradiction about the number of animals.  In Chapter 6 (v. 19), God tells Noah to take two of every creature on board.  In Chapter 7 (v. 2) this has become seven pairs of ‘clean’ animals and only two of the unclean ones.  But in verse 8, Noah goes on board with only two pairs of each.  In fact, it hardly makes sense to take seven pairs of animals on board.  Which suggests that the seven was inserted by some scribe simply in order to bring the ‘magical’ seven into the text.  The same could also be said of Noah’s age, six hundred - the beginning of his seventh century.

The same number mysticism can be seen in the Hebrew sacred lampstand known as the menorah, which has six branches on either side, with three cups on each, making eighteen.  You would expect the central stem (the seventh) to have another three cups, making twenty-one.  Instead it has four, making twenty-two.  Twenty-two cups divided by seven branches - the number pi. 

THE TETRAD

Pythagoras also attached peculiar importance to a figure he called the tetrad - ten pebbles arranged in the form of a triangle.

Pythagoras regarded this figure as a symbol of the supernatural, and Hayes sees it as a symbol of evolutionary ascent, with the topmost pebble as a symbol - like top doh - of the upward movement to a higher level (Plato calls the tetrad ‘the music of the spheres’).  From the tetrad, Pythagoras derives two more sacred numbers: ten (for the number of pebbles) and four (for the number of lines.) 

MOHAMMED IN HEAVEN

Hayes goes on to demonstrate how the symbol of the tetrad also occurs repeatedly in religion and hermeticism.  For example, a commentary on the Koran called the Tafsir describes the Prophet’s visit to the seven heavens, which begins with Mohammed mounting a quadruped which is neither donkey nor mule, then entering a mosque and lowering his head three times in prayer, after which the angel Gabriel offers him two vessels, one full of wine, one full of milk, and after he has chosen the milk, conducts him to the first heaven.  So we have the quadruped - number four - followed by bowing the head three times, followed by the two vessels, followed by the first heaven - the numbers forming a tetrad.  The quadruped is also symbolic; being neither donkey nor mule, it symbolises the third force or manifestation, so leading to the next line of the tetrad, the three.  The two vessels of wine and milk are also symbolic, the milk symbolising gentleness, kindness, (the Chinese Yin principle) as against  the more positive and assertive wine.

The results of Mike Hayes’s decade of study of religion were finally written down in a book called The Infinite Harmony in which separate sections dealt with ancient Egypt, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Jainism, Buddhism (with its eightfold path), and the hermetic code, one on the I Ching, and one on the genetic code.  His basic argument is that the musical octave, together with the Law of Three and the Law of Seven, express some basic code of life and the law governing evolution.  And he demonstrates that these numbers turn up with bewildering frequency in the world’s great religions (The Book of Revelation seems to be particularly full of number symbolism and musical symbolism.) 

CODE OF THE PYRAMID

Inevitably the reader begins to wonder whether all this merely demonstrates the author’s determination to make the numbers fit the facts - for example, I found myself wondering why God made it rain for forty days and forty nights, rather than seven or eight or twenty-two that might be expected (although the answer could lie in multiplying the two numbers of the tetrad, four and ten.)  Yet even accepting his argument at its lowest level, there can be no possible doubt about the strange recurrence of the number three and seven and eight throughout the world’s religions, as if they all incorporate some musical principle.

But this, of course, is only the foundation of Hayes’s argument.  Its essence is the notion that the ‘hermetic code’ is also an evolutionary code - it is something to do with the way life manifests itself, and attempts continually to move to a higher level.  Hayes believes that what he had glimpsed is something very like “the rhythm of life” seen by Hall’s student in the film of the shoolchildren: the same hidden rhythm by which the Hopi and the Navajo and the Quiche still regulate their lives, and which the priests of ancient Egypt recognised as the creative force of  Osiris.

In fact, the chapter on Egypt and the Great Pyramid is particularly convincing because - as we have seen - there can be little doubt that the Egyptians set out deliberately to encode their knowledge - such as the size of the earth.  In some cases, it is  hard to know precisely what the Egyptians were trying to tell us.  We learn, for example, that in the antechamber to the King’s Chamber, there is a square granite relief whose area is exactly equal to the area of a circle, whose diameter happens to be the precise length of the antechamber floor.  Moreover, when this length is multiplied by pi, the result is precisely the length of the solar year - 365.2412 pyramid inches.  It is difficult to understand why the architect of the Pyramid wanted to transmit this information, or to whom.  On the other hand, it seems that the off-centre niche in the Queen’s Chamber, which has baffled most writers on the Pyramid, is precisely one sacred cubit off centre, as if the architect was trying to tell us precisely what basic measure he was using.  So the other encoded information may be just as practical. 

RECURRENCE OF PI

Hayes also argues convincingly for the Egyptian knowledge of pi (which, we may recall, was supposed to have been discovered two thousand years later by Pythagoras.)  He cites, for example, a decree which appoints a certain high priest Director of all 22 ‘nomes’ (districts) of Upper Egypt.  Later, when the son is appointed, he is only director of 7 nomes.  The symbolism seems to be obvious: father over son, twenty-two over seven.

He also points out that the association of the Great Pyramid with the ‘Magic Square of Hermes’, 2080, which happens to be the sum of all numbers from 1 to 64 - the number of the I Ching and the genetic code.

Schwaller de Lubicz’s years studying the Temple of Luxor left him in no doubt of its incredibly precise symbolism.  His major work The Temple of Man (not to be confused with the smaller Temple in Man, also about Luxor) demonstrates beyond all doubt that the Luxor temple symbolises a human being, with various chambers corresponding precisely to various organs.  Here again, the architect enjoyed playing with number codes, many of which Schwaller is able to decipher in the course of three volumes.  An Ancient Egyptian mystic would no doubt have found the Temple, like the Great Pyramid, an amazing and continuous revelation.  But in spite of Schwaller’s decoding, most of its meaning is now lost to us.

THE I CHING

As we have seen, Mike Hayes’s starting point was his observation of the odd similarity between the genetic code and the I Ching.

The I Ching is, of course, a book of ‘oracles’ which is consulted for advice.  This certainly sounds like pure superstition.  But the psychologist Carl Jung, who launched the book upon the modern world by introducing Richard Wilhelm’s translation in 1951, believed there was more to it than that.  He argued that there is a hidden truth behind the I Ching which he called synchronicity (in a small book of that title), an “acausal connecting principle.”

The I Ching is consulted either by throwing down three coins six times, and noting the preponderance of heads or tails (tails for yin - a broken line - and heads for yang, an unbroken line.)  It can also be consulted by a method using fifty yarrow stalks of which one is thrown aside, leaving 49, which we note is seven times seven.  So it would seem that one method is based on the Law of Three, the other on the Law of Seven.

It must be borne in mind that when the Book of Changes first came into being, it was not a ‘book’, but merely two lines, a broken and unbroken one, meaning respectively no and yes, and the questioner threw down the coins (or divided the yarrow stalks) only once.  It seems to have struck the legendary inventor of the I Ching, the sage Fu Hsi (believed to have lived in the third millennium BC), that the two lines can change their nature, becoming their opposite.  Fu Hsi arranged the lines into trigrams, then hexagrams.  He began with Ken, ‘keeping still, the mountain.’  Then he contemplated these hexagrams, conceiving them as nets of forces, and tried to envisage the meaning of the changes within them.  At that stage it was an exercise in pure intuition.  Most of the hexagrams were probably not even named.  A slightly later version of the hexagrams began with K’un, ‘the receptive.’

About 1000 BC, King Wen had been imprisoned by the tyrant Chou Hsin, and it was there, after a vision in which he saw the hexagrams placed in a circle, that he arranged them in their present form, beginning with the masculine hexagram Ch’en, ‘the creative’, and adding commentaries.  Wen was rescued by his son, who overthrew the tyrant, and Wen became ruler.  Confucius added more commentaries about five hundred years later.

So the I Ching began purely as symbols, contemplated for their inner meaning.  This is clearly how Jung saw them.

The Swiss philosopher Jean Gebser notes (in his magnum opus The Ever Present Origin, 1949) that ‘the revision of the former book or oracles into a book of wisdom...indicates the decisive fact that around 1000 BC man began to awaken to a diurnal, wakeful consciousness’, which suggests that in China, as in the Mediterranean, some fundamental changes in the nature of human consciousness had appeared. 

ENTRAINMENT

It is only towards the end of the Dance of Life that Edward T. Hall mentions the name of Jung, whose idea of the collective unconscious seems to flow like an undercurrent through the book.  Hall is also speaking about synchronicity - which he sees as form of ‘entrainment’ (a term invented by William Condon, which means what happens when one person picks up another’s rhythm - in other words, sympathetic vibration.)  Hall sees synchronicity as a type of entrainment, in which events are experienced simultaneously by two people in different places.  He cites a story about Jung, who was on a train, feeling oddly depressed as he thought about a patient with severe marital problems.  At a certain point in this gloomy meditation, Jung happened to check his watch - and later learned that the patient had committed suicide at that exact moment.

But of course, this not all Jung means by synchronicity.  Neither are Hall’s personal examples of a colleague ringing him with information that he needed urgently, or of experiencing ‘in my own body sensations that were present in someone else’s body.’  These could be explained by some kind of telepathy.  Many examples of synchronicity cited by Jung are of coincidences so preposterous that they sound like fiction.  A typical example concerns the poet Marcel Deschamps, who was given a piece of plum pudding by a certain M. Fortgibu when he was a boy.  Ten years later, he saw some plum pudding in a window of a Paris restaurant, and went in to ask if he could have some - only to be told that it had been ordered by M. Fortgibu.  Many years later, he was invited to a meal that included plum pudding, and remarked that all that was wanting was M. Fortigibu.  As he said this, M. Fortgibu in - he had come to the wrong address. 

THE PSYCHE ‘ORGANISES’ MATTER

Jung comments that ‘either there are physical processes which cause psychic happenings, or there is a pre-existent psyche which organises matter.’  What is implied is that such coincidences happen when the mind is in a state of harmony and balance.  This is perfectly illustrated by a story told to Jung by his friend Richard Wilhelm, translator of the I Ching.  Wilhelm was in a remote Chinese village that was suffering form drought, and a rainmaker was sent for from a distant village.  The man asked for a cottage on the outskirts of the village.  At the end of that time, there was a tremendous downpour, followed by snow.  Wilhelm asked the old man how he had done it; the old man replied that he didn’t.  “I come from a region where everything is in order.  It rains when it should rain, and is fine when it is needed.  But the people in this village are all out of Tao and out of themselves.  I was at once infected when I arrived, so I asked for a cottage on the edge of the village, so I could be alone.  When I was once more in Tao, it rained.”

The story seems to be a perfect example of what Hall means when he speak of the Indian’s harmony with nature.  It is also an example of harmony referred to in the title of Hayes’s The Infinite Harmony - the harmony of Confucius, and Lao Tse, the founder of Taoism - regarded as the essence of ‘right living.’

Yet we are still faced with a puzzling and totally illogical notion of a book - made of paper and printer’s ink - answering questions.  One obvious possibility would be that the questions are answered by ‘spirits’, rather as with an Ouija board.  But apparently the Chinese do not accept this notion.  Jung explains their view by saying that ‘whatever happens in a given moment possesses inevitably the quality peculiar to that moment’, and mentions a wine connoisseur who can tell from the taste of the wine the exact location of the vineyard, and antique dealers who name the time and place where a certain objet d’art was made; he even adds the risky analogy of an astrologer who can tell you merely by looking at the sign you were born under and the rising sign at the time of your birth.

The I Ching, then, may be either regarded as some kind of living entity, or as a kind of ready reckoner which is able to inform the questioner of the exact meaning of the hexagram he has obtained.  It is, at all events, based upon the notion that there is no such thing as pure chance.

This notion sounds preposterous, but it seems to be supported by quantum physics, in which the observer somehow alters the event he is observing.  For example, a beam of light shone through a pinhole will cause a small circle of light to appear on a screen (or photographic plate) behind it.  If two pinholes are opened side by side, there are two interlinked circles of light, but the portion that overlaps has number of dark lines, due to the ‘interference’ of the two beams, which cancel one another out.  If the beam is now dimmed, so that only one photon at a time can pass through, you would expect the interference lines to disappear when the plate is finally developed.  Yet the interference lines are still there.  But if we watch the photons with a photon detector, to find out what is happening at the holes, the interference pattern disappears.c’ may be merely a recognition of these laws of chance. ABSURD SYNCHRONICITIES

Jung seems to be suggesting that, in the same way, our minds affect the patterns of the real world, unconsciously ‘fixing’ the results.  I have described elsewhere (1) how, when I began to write an article on synchronicity, the most absurd synchronicities began to occur.  The most preposterous of these was as follows.  I described how a friend, Jacques Vallee, had been seeking information on the Biblical prophet Melchizedek (2), because he was interested in a Los Angeles sect called the Order of Melchizedek.  He could find very little.  But when he took a taxi to a Los Angeles airport, and asked the taxi driver for a receipt, she gave him one signed ‘M. Melchizedek.’  Thinking that perhaps there were hundreds of Melchizedeks in Lost Angeles, he looked in the vast telephone directory.  There was only one Melchizedek - his taxi driver.

After I had finished writing this story, I broke off to take my dogs for a walk.  On the camp bed in my basement, I noticed a book that I did not recognise; it was called You Are Sentenced to Life, by W.D. Chesney, a Los Angeles doctor, and I knew it was my book because I had sent it to be bound.  (My house contains over 20,000 books, so it is easy to lose track.)  When I came back from my walk, I opened it - and found myself looking at a page headed ORDER OF MELCHIZEDEK - a copy of a letter from the founder to the Order to the author of the book.  I felt my hair prickle.  It was as if some fate had whispered in my ear:  “If you think Jacques Vallee’s story is the strangest synchronicity you’ve ever heard of, how about this?”  It was as if synchronicity was setting out to convince me of its reality.

How can we explain synchronicities?  Unless we dismiss them as ‘pure chance’, we are forced to share Jung’s conclusion that the mind plays a more active part in forming reality that we realise.  Or, as Jung puts it, ‘there is a pre-existent psyche that organises matter.’

This is clearly very close to the views of the Hopi and Navajo Indians as described by Hall - the feeling that our mental attitudes influence nature and the material world, so that, for example, a house cannot be built until the builders have created ‘right thoughts’.  The Indians feel that their minds can influence the future of the house, just as, according to Jung, our minds influence the fall of coins in consulting the I Ching.

Mike Hayes would express it slightly differently.  He would say that the basic energies of which the universe is made are constructed of vibrations that obey the laws of music; therefore events follow these ‘hidden laws.’

A simple example may clarify the point.  Try asking someone to write down his telephone number, then to write down the same number with the digits jumbled up.  Now tell him to subtract the smaller number from the larger one, and to add together the digits of the answer until they become a single number (i.e. 784 will become 19, then 10, then 1.)  You can tell him that the answer is nine.  This is because the answer is always nine.  It works with the biggest or smallest numbers.

I am not enough of a mathematician to know why it is so, but I know that it is not ‘magic’ - merely the laws of arithmetic.  Jung would say that synchronicities are the operation of similar laws of reality.  Mike Hayes would add that those laws are basically musical in nature.

TRIAL BY CONDOR

So what may appear to be primitive ‘magic’ may be merely a recognition of these laws of chance.

An example was witnessed by television reporter Ross Salmon in the late 1970s.  He was visiting the Calawaya Indians of Lake Titicaca, and learned that, while the medicine had gone to the city to earn money, his wife Wakchu was suspected of being unfaithful to him.  A council of local women and a council of elders was undecided about her guilt, so the priests announced that they would ‘call the condor’ to decide the matter.  The Calawayas believe that human beings are reincarnated as condors, and that ‘the Great Condor’ is a reincarnation of a great Inca leader.

Salmon was allowed to film the ceremony at the top of a sheer cliff, as the priests performed their ritual to summon the condor, throwing coco leaves into the air and chanting.  The next day, Wakchu was taken to the site, and tied to a post, stripped to her loincloth.  Salmon was quite convinced that nothing would happen.  But after half an hour, a condor appeared, flew around overhead, then landed on a rock facing Wakchu.  It sat there for a time, then stepped right up in front of the girl and pointed its beak up at her.  The elders cried ‘Guilty - she must take her own life.’  If Salmon had any doubts about the genuineness of the ceremony, they vanished ten days later when the girl flung herself from the high cliff.

All this was shown on Westward Television, with Salmon’s commentary.  When he wrote a book about his travels, In Search of Eldorado, I hastened to buy it, so that I could quote his description.  To my surprise, he only told half the story, making it altogether more ambiguous.  When I saw him subsequently, I asked him why this was, and he explained that scientists had advised him to ‘water it down’, because he had obviously been tricked.  Yet the film left no doubt whatsoever that he had not been tricked.

Here, it seems, the condor was ‘called’ in much the same way as the porpoises in Sir Arthur Grimble’s account, and then played the part of the oracle, indicating the girl’s guilt.  No ‘rational’ explanation can cover the facts (short of cheating on the part of the priests); but Hopi Indians or the natives of Gilbert Islands would certainly find nothing unbelievable about the events.

Ross Salmon also mentions that he spoke to two tribes of Indians in the Bolivia-Columbia area, both illiterate, but with endless events stored in memory, and that both told him that man had been on earth longer than anyone suspects.