mirrored file at http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ 
For complete access to all the files of this collection
	see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php 
==========================================================

*SECRETS OF FORGOTTEN WORLDS:*

*A CONVERSATION WITH PETER TOMPKINS*

by

J. Douglas Kenyon

------------------------------------------------------------------------

For the many who date their personal discovery of the wisdom of the
ancients and the power of unseen forces with the late 1960s and early
'70s, two books enjoyed nearly unequaled influence. The Secret Life of
Plants and Secrets of the Great Pyramid were both runaway best sellers,
which, if nothing else, put the orthodox establishment to considerable
trouble defending itself. While today, notions such as the preference of
plants for good music and the miraculous measurements of the Great
Pyramid may have become somewhat passe, 25 years ago they caused quite a
stir, and in the process earned not a little notoriety for author Peter
Tompkins. For one who had dared to challenge so flagrantly the titans of
the scientific establishment, Tompkins achieved not only celebrity, but
also, for a time, an unprecedented measure of credibility.

Both books remain in print but Tompkins, though scrupulous in his
research, came to be dismissed by the conventional as something of a
crank. More recent books (i.e., Secrets of the Mexico Pyramids, and
Secrets of the Soil) have done little to change his undeserved
reputation; nevertheless he remains today busy and unrepentant. Nor have
advancing years quenched his fire. At 75, Tompkins has just delivered to
his publisher Harper's his latest manuscript, offering concrete proof of
the existence of elemental creatures. The book should be forthcoming in
the next few months.

Just back from a trip to Colombia, the author, at his home in
Washington, D.C., took time recently to share his secrets on many
mysteries, ancient and otherwise.

Originally from Georgia, Tompkins grew up in Europe, but returned to the
U.S. to study at Harvard. College, though, was interrupted by World War
II. Initially employed by the New York Herald Tribune, Tompkins began
the war as a correspondent. Soon he was broadcasting for Mutual and NBC.
By the end of the war he was working with Edward R. Murrow and CBS. In
1941, his reporting career was interrupted by a stint in the TOI (a
precursor of OSS, which ultimately became the CIA). Five months were
spent behind enemy lines. At the Anzio landing, he recalls, General
Donovan and General Park sent me into Rome ahead of the landing, and had
they not failed to arrive, we would have had a big victory. But as it
was, we got stuck. Then I had to send out radio messages four or five
times a day of what the Germans were doing, where they were going to
attack and in what strength and so on. During the mission, Tompkins
recruited numerous agents which were sent north to link up with the
partisans and help clear the way for the planned allied advance.
Eventually he went to Berlin. When, at the close of the war, Truman
abolished the OSS, Tompkins found he had no desire to join the newly
organized CIA and went his own way. The years following the war were
spent in Italy learning moviemaking and scriptwriting and developing a
healthy distaste for censorship. I realized the only way I could say
what I wanted to say was by writing books. They don't get censored.

Even then, he was finding his views made him anathema to many. I got
thrown out of more dinner parties, he chuckles, for talking about
metaphysical, or what were considered crazy, notions at the time, so I
learned to be quiet.

Being quiet in print, though, has not been his wont. Nor has censorship
of a sort been entirely escaped. Tompkins believes his most recent book
Secrets of the Soils which he describes as A cry to save the planet from
the chemical killers was virtually squashed by the publisher afraid of
scaring the public. A followup on the Secret Life of Plants, the book
spelled out alternatives to the use of chemical fertilizers which
Tompkins says are absolutely useless and only lead to killing the soil
and the microorganisms, poisoning the plants and ultimately animals and
humans. Tompkins believes such fertilizers to be primary contributors to
the spread of cancer.

The writer has found his plans thwarted, not only by publishers. One
idea to use a promising technology he had chanced upon, to virtually
X-Ray the Great Pyramid, was apparently blocked by Zahi Hawass and the
Egyptian Antiquities Authority. It would have cost about fifty grand to
X-Ray the whole pyramid and find out what the hell really is in there,
he says. It seemed to me that it would make an interesting television
program, but no one was interested. It was very strange.

On the recent highly publicized work of Belgian astronomer Robert Bauval
purporting to show an alignment between the pyramids and the
constellation Orion, he shrugs. It's a hypothesis, but it's not
provable. I'm only interested in those things about the great pyramid
which are solid, which are indisputable. Tompkins wants more than
endless theories, of which he claims to have a room full. But he
concedes, If you think of the Dogon and the Sirius connection, it's
obvious that on this planet, that people knew a great deal more about
astronomy and may have been linked in one way or another with the stars.
But I'm only interested when someone comes along with fairly hard proof.

Proof of advanced ancient astronomical knowledge, Tompkins believes, is
abundant in much of the ancient architecture. It's obvious that all the
great temples in Egypt were astronomically oriented and geodetically
placed, he says. He is especially interested in Tel el-Amarna which he
sees as the subject of a possible future book. The astronomical
knowledge incorporated into the city built by Akhenaton, Tompkins
believes to be mind blowing. Unfortunately for his plans though, Livio
Catullo Stecchini, the Italian scholar and authority on ancient
measurement, upon whom Tompkins relied for much of his work in Secrets
of the Great Pyramid, is dead.

Interestingly, Tompkins never permitted Secrets of the Great Pyramid to
be published in Italy because the publisher wanted to cut out
Stecchini's appendix (not the organ, but the text). The injustice still
angers Tompkins. Here's an unrecognized Italian genius, but the Italians
said if you print it you can't have the book.

His subsequent book on the Mexican Pyramids further reinforced Tompkins
view that the ancients were possessed of advanced astronomical
knowledge. Though not convinced that the similarities between Egypt and
Mexico prove the existence of a mother culture like Atlantis, as some
have suggested, he does believe it's obvious that people went back and
forth across the Atlantic. And he believes the Mexico builders used the
same system of measurements as the Egyptians. I should write another
whole book on the subject of what was known on both sides of the Atlantic.

During his Mexico experience, Tompkins succeeded, at great expense and
difficulty, in filming the effect of the rising and setting sun at
equinox on the temple at Chichen Itza. It's absolutely staggering, he
relates, but you can see that snake come alive, just on that one day. It
goes up and down the steps. We filmed it and it's just beautiful. How
did they orient that pyramid so that would happen only on the equinox?

Answering that question led Tompkins to New Zealand and Geoffrey
Hodgeson, who gained fame in the 1920s by clairvoyantly pinpointing the
precise position of the planets at a given time. Convinced by Hodgeson's
demonstration, Tompkins concluded that he knew the secret by which the
ancients were able to achieve their precise astronomical alignments
without access to modern instruments. They didn't need the instruments,
because the instruments were built into them. Clairvoyantly they could
tell exactly where the planets were and understand their motion. Such
understanding, while available to the ancients, has been largely
forgotten by alienated high-tech Western society. We've closed ourselves
in, he says. We've pulled down the shades on our second sight.

Fascinated by clairvoyance and the potential it represents, Tompkins has
tried to deploy it as a resource for his more scientific investigation.
When his own search for concrete proof for the existence of Atlantis
took him to the Bahamas he used every tool at his disposal. When one
site appeared to be littered with ancient marble columns and pediments,
it was a psychic who told him that the spot was nothing more than the
final resting place of a nineteenth-century ship bound for New Orleans
with a marble mausoleum on board. On the more scientific side,
clandestine core sampling of the celebrated Bimini Road convinced him
the pavement was not manmade but only beach rock. It took a University
of Miami geologist to give him what he wanted.

Dr. Cesare Emiliani showed Tompkins the result of his own core sampling
over the years in the Gulf of Mexico. Here was conclusive proof of a
great inundation of water in about 9,000 BC. Tompkins remembers,
Emiliani said, they say that Atlantis has been found in the Azores and
found off the coast of Spain and off the East Coast of the United
States. All of these places, he said, could have been part of the
Atlantean empire that was submerged at exactly the date when Plato said
it was.

Several years earlier he had written the foreword for the English
translation of Otto Muck's book, The Secret of Atlantis. Muck's
hypothesis that Atlantis had been sunk by an asteroid Tompkins thought
very plausible, and he still thinks so, though it remains to be proven.
In Emiliani's work, though, Tompkins believes he has found the only
geological proof on the subject.

Of course, proved or not, Atlantis, like many other controversial
notions, is not likely to be readily accepted by the intellectual
establishment. The reasons for which seem clear to Tompkins. They would
have to rewrite all their archeological schoolbooks if some of this is
proved. If John West's theory about the Sphinx is correct (that it's
over 10,000 years old) it's going to change a lot of stuff. By way of
analogy he describes a man he knows in Canada who has developed a cure
for cancer and points out what a threat such a discovery is to the
billion-dollar-a-year cancer industry. All of which leads him to another
one of his favorite subjects, though acknowledging that it may cost him
credibility with some people: Who really wrote Shakespeare?

It was written like Hollywood scripts are written today, he explains.
Written by members of the privy council, which could have been at the
time, not only Bacon and Southhampton, but all of them who were
involved, one way or another, in trying to save the country from civil
war, and realized that neither the Catholics nor the Protestants had the
answer, and you had to look deeper somewhere. So you had to go back to
the Egyptians, hence the presence of Giordano Bruno involved in some of
the plays. He sighs, The whole subject is absolutely riveting and
fascinating.

A lifetime of searching the hidden byways has made Tompkins
philosophical about his own inevitable physical transition. While
acknowledging that he is getting on, he says, I'm infinitely more
peaceful about the prospect of death. Like time, it's sort of an
illusion. I mean you lose the body but what's that. You've had many
before and you'll probably have more after. Maybe you'll do better
without them. At any rate, his productivity has yet to suffer. His next
book promises to prove the existence of elemental creatures.

The project was inspired by the recent scientific validation of the work
of Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater in mapping sub-atomic structure.
Before the turn of the century the two leaders of the theosophical
society had decided to used their yogic powers to analyze the elements.
Leadbeater saw and Besant drew. When their work was published, no one
paid any attention. After all, not only was it impossible to do what
they were doing but their results contradicted conventional science.
Then in the 1970s an English physicist discovered their work and
realized that they were accurately describing quarks and other features
of the atom which had only recently been discovered. With such powerful
vindication established, Tompkins now goes into the detailed work which
the two produced on elemental spirits, as well as the work of the
renowned clairvoyant Rudolf Steiner. If you put it all together and
realize these people could actually, many years ahead of the discovery
of atoms and isotopes, accurately describe and draw them, and then look
at their description of the nature spirits, their function on the
planet, their connection with human beings and why it is that we should
reconnect with them, you have to listen. I mean it's black and white.
You can't escape it.

What will the new book be named? I don't know because I hate to give
names to my books. They'll probably call it the Secret Life of something
or other....