29 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good but uneven, September 24, 1999
While Wilson presents some excellent puzzles for the mind here, I found myself continually confused by his frequent digressions. One minute we're discussing earth-crust displacement, then we are talking about Piltdown Man, then roaming the inner corridors of the Great Pyramid.
I think Wilson is onto something here, but I wish he had told the information in a more cogent, straight-forward fashion.
For much of the same info, check out "The Message of the Sphinx" by Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval. There's much more research there and the writing is quite good.
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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
THOUGHTFUL AND EXCITING SUMMARY OF ALTERNATIVE IDEAS, March 28, 2004
Colin Wilson is both a prolific and talented writer, whose books always reflect a lot of serious research and thought. When I found a copy of From Atlantis to the Sphinx at a book sale, I grabbed it. But I soon found I was reading a summary of the views of the major alternative history writers, and I found myself skimming through material with which I was already familiar. He covers all my favorites -- Graham Hancock, Robery Bauval, John Anthony West, Zechariah Sitchen, Rand Flem-Ath, Cremo and Thompson, and such older luminaries as Velikoksky, Hapgood, Gurdjieff and many other authors who have put forth theories about the nature and history of mankind. Despite the rehash, Wilson's comments on these writers and their ideas make for interesting reading.
For instance, he does not buy into Sitchen's idea that our solar system contains the planet Nibiru from which the Gods of Sumer came to create mankind. But he accepts much of Sitchen's remarkable scholarship on the Sumerians. He is impressed with Hapgood's data on the shifting location of earth's poles and the evidence he gathered from old maps that there was once a highly developed civilization on earth that has been forgotten. Cremo and Thompson's classic Forbidden Archeology is an insightful and amazing read, as they pile up evidence over 1000 pages showing mankind may be millions of years old, and Wilson uses their examples. Wilson provides colorful "back stories" about these authors, since he has met many of them personally.
There is purpose to Wilson's long discourse on the ideas of other authors; he delivers the goods in the end when he gives up his own fascinating theory of ancient Egyptian society. Wilson's narrative leads us to see that mankind may once have had a different way of seeing reality, the same kind of seeing as the shaman exercising "magic" rituals. He invites us to consider the Collective Mind, consciousness acting in consort to achieve some end, much as birds move in a flock. Conscousness can be concentrated to build up power and this can be expended as a physical force. How did the ancient Egyptians move those giant blocks of stone to form the pyramids? Could they have used their own collective mental power?
It is fascinating to me to read of feats that should require a huge expenditure of power (like moving giant blocks of stone), but are somehow accomplished without any application of normal means of power generation. Consider the testimony of Douchan Gersi (an interesting author NOT mentioned by Wilson) who wrote about the "flying men" of Haiti who could dematerialize in one location and rematerialize in another. There was no technology involved. Did mankind once know how to use another kind of power, one based on group consciousness? We sometimes enter this consciousness, which we identify as "peak" experience, when we seem outside linear time, and reality somehow is altered.
Wilson is telling us that because our conscousness has evolved in a different direction from our remote ancestors, we fail to grasp how they accomplished tasks like building the pyramids. He does not see teams of sweating slaves, or ridiculously long ramps, or ancient fork lifts, but simply the collective power of human consciousness working for common purpose. Wilson, as usual, entertains while building a well-documented case for his own unique alternative view of human history.
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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Very interesting material, March 7, 2000
The central idea of this book is getting a lot of attention lately, such as in "Fingerprints of the gods": did a highly developped and sea-faring nation exist before the beginning of our history, and can we explain some of the ancient mysteries such as the pyramids, the Piri Reis-map, the architecture of the Maya and their predecessors, and even Atlantis? It sounds so far fetched, yet if you listen to the arguments of researchers and writers such as Wilson, it's hard to stay sceptical. Now I would read anything that Colin Wilson writes, and this book is fine. But since I read it after "Fingerprints..." most of the surprise was gone... as this Wilson-book owes quite a bit to (amongst others) Graham Hancocks work. But leave it to Colin Wilson to come up with all sorts of new angles, writers I never heard about and very interesting ideas, so this book was defenitely worth while.
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