Customer Reviews

From Atlantis to the Sphinx

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I was told in high school (and not only there) that a construction made of 6 million tons of building material (!!) and with building blocks that weigh anywhere from 10 to 20 tons each and having been lifted as high as 250 feet up was done merely by using 1000s of slaves and primitive cranes..That's how the Egyptian pyramids were supposedly built. Answering to another reviewer here, you would have to be spectacularly gullible to buy such nonsense.
But I'd rather get to the point. What Colin Wilson is is a self-educated man, a person for whom the term "bibliophile" is a tremendous understatement. His strength as a writer, as many have pointed out, lays in the fact that he takes the works and theories of other people and composes them into his own, weighing the pros and cons in the search for facts, for truth. In this process he remains as open minded as such a task demands and in my opinion this is the biggest credit of respect you can pay to your readers before anything else. Why would we need another "scientist" ruminating the "same ole-same ole" regardless of how absurd or unlikely his theory is just so he fits in with the "knowledge establishment"? No thanks..
What this books maintains is then nothing that other researchers havent theorised (if not actually PROVEN) before. It provides facts and theories about a maritime civilisation that predated the Egyptians by 1000s of years and which had either the technological know how or simply possesed a totally different thought that enabled them to achieve things that seem incomprehensible to us..According to all these researchers (and Wilson) this civilisation was widely destroyed by a natural disaster but survivors of it transfered their knowledge, or more accurately, their knowledge system, to subsequent civilisations, in this case the Egyptians, but also to the Mayas to name another.
It's no easy thing to summarise what "From Atlantis to..." proposes as it composes parts and aspects from so many theories. The fairest thing to do is to read the book and allow yourself to be exposed to what it suggests and judge for your own, allthough, it must be said, if you remain/are openminded what will more likely happen is you'll feel inspired to read much-much more on the subject.
I think that exactly for that fact alone this is a great book from Wilson, it is one that pushes you to open a closet that conventional archaelogists stubbornly consider sealed. Far from... It's also a book that reads through very comfortably considering its task and it is definately very comprehensive on anything it deals with. But then again, for the initiated Wilson readers this is nothing new.
I am Greek. And Greece is a country filled with ancient "miracles" too which are being explained away by mainstream science with theories that make me laugh. Recently i was up at the Delphi temple. I'd last been there as a kid and hadnt thought much by what i saw. Wilson's books have made me look at things with new eyes. It's not what you believe it's how you come to believe in what you believe. That's why this book and its bibliography as a whole are important.

Wilson has presented an interesting and plausible alternative account of the history of mankind on Earth, namely that humans have existed for much longer than orthodox academics are willing to believe, and that advanced civilizations had developed millennia before the Great Pyramids of Egypt. Most of this alternative view is based on ideas put forth previously by other researchers, and therefore if you have already read many other books on this topic you may not find a whole lot of new information here. Nevertheless, it is a decent summary of those previously proposed ideas, and thus this book serves as a good introduction to the subject. However, I feel that this summary may be too comprehensive - he tries to squeeze in so much information that it wasn't easy for me to remember everything he had said (especially all those people's names), and so the more I read the more I forgot, making it harder and harder to follow his writing.

But this book is not just about history. In fact, Wilson emphasizes that he doesn't care that much about exactly when or where those ancient civilizations started, per se. Instead, his ultimate objective is to see whether we can learn something from those ancient civilizations. He argues that prior to around 1,500 B.C., our ancestors were "right-brained" in that they had greater harmony with one another and with nature, were aware of various hidden powers of the mind, and possessed group consciousness. In contrast, modern man has become "left-brained", meaning that he tackles problems logically and analytically, which enabled the impressive technological advancements we achieved in the last 3,500 years. Wilson believes that right-brain abilities are still with us, but most of us do not take advantage of them. The author argues that inducing our right-brain consciousness can lead to good feelings and a sense of freedom, which can compensate for the anxiety and feeling of emptiness that left-brain consciousness often gives rise to.

The great thing about Colin Wilson is that he has some unique ideas and a plethora of evidence to support them. The bad thing about him is that he's had these ideas for decades so one book tends to sound like the next with only the evidence changing. That being said I really enjoyed this book. It focusses on evidence that there was an advanced civilization before 9000 b.c. Another great thing about Colin is that he's a synthesist. He takes dozens of books and pulls them into his own work. Here, his main sources are Fingerprints of the Gods and Forbidden Archeology plus a dozen or so others. Why not read those instead of Wilson rehashing their ideas. Read them but use this book as a introduction to them. I gave this book 4 stars because I think Colin failed at his underlying point. Throughout the book he talks of this theoried ancient civilization having a different way of thinking, of communicating, than we do now and that this was the real reason he wrote the book. Although he touched on what that way of thinking was he never convinced me that it was true. I wanted to believe it but it never happened.

Wilson weaves together myth, memory, and astronomy in an awareness
that commands us to respect the intellect of humans from tens and even
hundreds of millenia in the past. Most significantly, Colin Wilson
imparts to the reader a sense of the scale of time itself -- a
realization that man, with an intelligence like our own, could have
lingered, thrived, and experienced destiny without competition and
without warfare for ages. Wilson's main contention is that modern man,
in forgettting his past, has forgotten something of central
importance... the eternal dance of life that transcends time.
Wilson's perceptions open the door to alternative scientific views of
man's past.

I read this book twice, once when it first came out and again more recently. The first time I read it I was familiar with some of the source material Wilson draws on. These parts of the book, at that time, were obviously not as engaging for me, nor, I suspect, will they be for others very familiar with the material. However, upon rereading it a couple years later I was again reminded of Wilson's masterful ability to draw together disparate sources of information to form a cohesive pattern. Of course, this involves speculation, but this type of inquiry always requires speculation, and Wilson manages to build a more cautious and convincing argument than many of his contemporaries. (That said, the reader must still be willing to be open-minded and entertain ideas that might not sit well, at least at first. If you have firmly made up your mind that, for example, there are no real mysteries surrounding the pyramids of Egypt or the sphinx and are unwilling to consider other opinions on the subject, then you probably won't be moved by much of this book.)

When drawing information from a variety of sources, it is likely that some of that information will later prove either incorrect or outdated. It is a testament to the cohesiveness of Wilson's argument that it does not rest on a single piece of evidence but is rather buttressed by a range of facts that each contribute to its strength. From reading some of the reviews below, I gather that often some of these "facts" don't sit well with all readers. This is reasonable (don't believe everything you read!); however, Wilson's style of thinking and researching make one less likely to discount his entire argument based on disagreement with parts of it. Furthermore, he is very adept at drawing his argument out over an entire book, reminding the reader along the way what the central themes are, before plunging back into the detailed information that forms the supports of his argument. What this results in is a stimulating, idea-filled journey that criss-crosses through numerous disciplines and over vast spans of time.

"From Atlantis to the Sphinx" in many ways forms a natural extension of Wilson's philosophy as expounded in his previous books. In this particular case, Wilson's ultimate aim - to demonstrate that ancient man had a different mode of thinking/perception/relationship to the natural world and the universe - is ultimately convincing for me because traces of this different mode still exist within us. If, by the time you're done with the book, you yourself aren't entirely convinced of this, I think you will still have found the journey worth the effort.

Wilson admirably follows and explains the recent developments in what we might call cryptoarcheology from Santillana to Hancock and Bauvel. But what really sets this book apart is the premise of the last five chapters- that modern man's brain is fundamentally diferent from the brains of the ancients and that difference bespeaks a completely different mode of perception.Theis idea is so well expanded upon by Wilson that I left the book having had that big AH HA experience, and have re read it many times since.Highly recommended to anyone who wishes to consider a new approach to understanding ancient mysteries.

This book was an unexpectedly compelling treatment of many varied aspects of what it is to be a human being and what each of us may be capable of. Being an artist in a left-brained civilization, I was especially interested in the final third of the book, which deals with the differences in left- and right-brained living and what we may have all sacrificed in the name of modern civilization. This book is a lively read and merges many disciplines in a fascinating narrative.