[These comments were first posted to The Daily Grail on 1 March 2001]

The earliest reference to a possible stash of records beneath the Sphinx (and the date of 10,500 BC) may be found in Ancient Egypt: Light of the World, a massive two volume set on Egyptian mythology first published by Theosophist Gerald Massey in 1907 (reprinted 1970). On p.337, Massey wrote:

An ancient Egyptian name for the Sphinx is Akar. This was also a name for the hollow of the under-world…. It is said that the very bones of the deities quake as the stars go on their triumphant courses through the tunnels of the Akar (Pyramid Texts, Teta, 319). It is demonstrable that a passage through the mount of earth, the same that was made through the Cow, was followed by the passage through Akar, the Sphinx, which was built for the god Har-Makhu, the Horus-sun that was immeasurably earlier than Ra…. The tunnel through the mount of the Sphinx is oblong; and it is noticeable that the oldest known pyramid in Egypt, that of Medum, is neither conical nor quadrangular, but oblong. To understand the nature of the Akar, says Renouf, we have to imagine a tunnel starting from the spot where the sun sets and extending through the earth as far as where the sun rises. Each end of the tunnel has a sphinx-like form. A human-headed lion couches at the entrance and also at the end. It is through the paws of this double sphinx that the galley of the sun-god enters on the western horizon and comes out on the eastern mount…. These two gates of entrance and exit on the horizon were called the gates of Akar, and sometimes the gates of Seb, the god of earth. They were the two gates of earth for the sun in the mythology, and the two gates of Akar for the manes in the eschatology. Thus the twofold horizon was imagd for Har-Makhu in the figure of the double Sphinx. The traditions leads one to think that profound secrets were buried in the building of the Sphinx, as was the way with these builders, who put all they knew into all they did.

Gerald Massey is also the probable source of Schwaller de Lubicz’s date of 10,500 BC. On p.339, he wrote:

The great Sphinx as keeper of these secrets was couched in mountainous repose upon the horizon in the eastern equinox, when the gate of ‘fair exit’ was in the lion-sign and the gate of ‘fair entrance’ was in Aquarius, the water-sign that is figured over the abyss of source on the celestial globe. The Sphinx then is a figure of the double horizon and the duality of Har-Makhu when the place of conjunction was at the point of precession in the lion-sign. And if, as is the Egyptian way, the fact was registered forthwith, we may date the Sphinx as a monument which was reared by these great builders and thinkers, who lived so largely out of themselves, some thirteen thousand years ago.

Massey never mentioned Atlantis.

Lee McGiffen