David Elkington - In the Name of the Gods
By Nigel Skinner-Simpson
David Elkington presented the third lecture of the day and certainly gave the audience some serious food for thought. He demonstrated how sacred sites around the world have been designed to resonate at human voice frequency and how when certain sounds are intoned at these sites, the resonance produced may induce an altered state of consciousness in the individual. He believes that ancient man used this "spiritual technology" to become at one with his god. He also illustrated the striking similarities between the myths associated with these sites and the stories of the one we know as Jesus. Finally, he took us inside the Great Pyramid at Giza to explain the startling results of the sonic experiments conducted inside the King's Chamber by his associate John Reid. The full story of how David discovered that religion is nothing other than an ancient science of sound can be found in his new book entitled "In The Name Of The Gods", published by Green Man Press.
David started his lecture with an anecdote to illustrate the effect that religion can have on the individual. Ten years ago, he was working as a sixth form lecturer at a college in Dorset. Late one night, he heard someone moving around outside and on taking a look spotted a man trying to break into one of the staff cars. David, an ex-monk, had taken to using his old habit as a bathrobe. He threw it on, put the hood up and going outside crept up to the man and put a hand on his shoulder. To much mirth, David described hearing a faint trickling sound. The man turned round to see David silhouetted against the moonlight, let out a piercing scream and ran off. The following day, a policeman arrived at the college and asked the principal if he knew the whereabouts of a "Mr. Death"! The man, a known felon, had been arrested in the Village Square in a state of shock, convinced he had seen death. David said that as a result of this experience the man became a practicing fundamentalist christian.
To David, religion seemed to have evolved into something seen as oppressive over the last 2000 years. He decided to find out what exactly was religion and started a worldwide quest that has lasted for 20 years to search for God. He next referred to the opening of St. John's Gospel, saying that it contained some of the profoundest and most enigmatic words ever written; "In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God". On tracing the origin of the word God, he found that it had a sanskrit root meaning 'voice', and also that the word 'universe' in its latin form means 'one word'. As David put it, at the beginning of creation, God gave expression to his voice - the word 'express' in latin meaning 'from out of pressure' - to create the universe, (or from the latin) the 'one word'. Interestingly, he noted that books on quantum cosmology talk about the high pressures present at the time of the creation of the universe.
In 1991, the background radiation test results obtained by the Kobe satellite indicated that there was an undulating flow of frequency throughout the entire universe, causing one of the NASA scientists to remark "My God, he was laughing." David stated that in a nutshell, everything vibrates and explained how the Earth reacts like a bell being hit by a hammer when struck by incoming waves from space, the frequency of vibration being around 8 vibrations per second.
David next talked about how the brain also has a frequency of vibration. He told the audience that their brains were vibrating with a resonance of around 25 vibrations per second, but that at sunrise and sunset the brain slips into a relaxed mode known as an alpha rhythm. In this state, the brain enters an altered state of consciousness in which its ability to communicate with the wider sensual realms of the earth are broadened in a very dramatic way. In common with sacred sites such as churches and cathedrals, pyramids and barrows, David believes that we have been made to resonate.
As he looked further, he found that the ancient texts talk about the gods being resonant frequencies. He gave the example of how the classical greeks called the gods 'Acousmata', meaning 'the ones within hearing'. David believes that myth in its ancient form is a lost language of science, and that the sacred sites are actually sites of an ancient and lost spiritual technology.
David next described an experiment conducted at Newgrange in the mid-1990s. Newgrange is the largest barrow of its type in Europe and is around five and a half thousand years old. In layout, it is similar to a medieval gothic cathedral, having a central or nave area surrounded by antechambers. The interior and external surfaces are carved with spirals, the meaning of which was unknown. The team wanted to measure the internal resonance of the barrow to see if it gave any clues as to its construction. The resonant frequency was found to be between 95 and 115 cycles per second, which according to David is male voice range. To the team's surprise, when smoke was introduced into the barrow to see what geometric forms would be produced, it took on the form of a perfect spiral that precisely described the acoustics of the interior, as did the carved spirals. To David, these resonant effects indicated that Newgrange was a major piece of spiritual technology. He knew that in other locations with similar resonant effects such as a cathedral, if one chants at the male voice range frequency the sound interacts with the human brain and drives its rate of vibration downwards to induce an instant alpha-state of consciousness.
David believes that with this knowledge, religion starts to take on a different emphasis. Newgrange along with many other monuments of the same age is the home of a God called the Dagda. The Dagda was married to a woman called the Morigan, which translates from the original gaelic as 'Mary from the Underworld'. They had a divine child named Angus, his secret name being Esus. On a stone held in the collection of a London museum, Esus is portrayed as being nailed to a tree i.e. being crucified. In gothic cathedrals with the same profound resonant effects, we can look up and see a man called Jesus nailed to a cross, a striking similarity.
Having discovered the resonant effects of these sites and the effect that this resonance has on us, David wondered why the God names were ineffable, meaning unspeakable. He realised that the names themselves were used as chants because when uttered in the correct way, they had their own individual waveforms that could drive down the brain's rate of vibration. It struck David how in our holy books, God is almost always seen in the form of sound rather than visually, and that Jesus often utters extraordinary things such as "nobody can come to the father but through me". It seemed to David that the words were a part of the ritual of this technology wherein the individual became at one with his God.
Going on to discuss the association of heroes and heroines with the ancient sites, David found that across the world they all had similar names. The mesopotamian god Marduk had the secret name Esa and his temple was known as the 'Song of Esa'. In Japan, around 1200 BC there was a god that constructed pyramids, some of which can still be seen. This god was a crucified god, risen on the third day and his name was Jizu. The north american indians have variations on the name Esu, Esau, Esaugeteh and so on. For David, the realization that the same myths, the same rituals, the same frequencies, the same legends and the same effect on human beings is found across the globe turned religion from a thing of superstitious fantasy and faith into the spiritual technology it was intended to be.
David decided to go to Egypt because it was the most intact of all the ancient civilizations and as such, any experimental results obtained would be nearer to the truth than could be obtained elsewhere. Using the Valley Temple at Giza as an illustration, he explained that red granite is incorporated into most of the sacred architecture across the world. Interestingly, red granite is heavy in radon gas, the imbibing of which can induce an altered state of consciousness.
Next, David launched into an anecdote about buying fish and chips! He was about to put some pure crystallized sea salt onto them when he noticed that the salt crystals were pyramidal in structure. He examined one with a microscope (having presumably eaten the fish and chips first) and was astonished to find that it was a miniature replica in every detail of the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan. David found the same shape and form in iron crystals and linked this to the fact that everything (including us) is made from stardust, from the same atoms formed billions of years ago in the central cores of stars. He believes that because of this there is a real sense of wholeness, of everything being connected to everything else, a sense that he thinks ancient man was remarkably aware of.
David used another anecdote to relate how the name Giza provides a clue to the site's original purpose. While walking through central London a few years ago, he heard one man refer to another as a geezer. Struck by the similarity to the name Giza, he looked it up in a dictionary of slang and found that it had been brought back to this country by soldiers in Wellington's Spanish Peninsula Army. The term originated in the Basque region and means "the man who came", or specifically, "The man who was crucified and rose from the dead". As David pointed out, the Basque language predates christianity by as much as three thousand years. Other similarities were to be found. The city of Cairo is known to arabs as the "Place of the Cross", and in David's words, he was absolutely astonished to hear a very influential and eminent egyptologist say that the ancient egyptians referred to the Great Pyramid as the 'Place of the Ascension'.
Having found the same words, names, resonant frequencies, myths and effects on visitors to sacred sites across the world, David and his good friend John Reid visited the Great Pyramid at the end of 1997 with the aim of discovering its true purpose. David said that deep inside the Great Pyramid there is a mystery and that although not able to illustrate it for us due to commitments made to various television companies, he would try to explain it to us. His first revelation was that the so-called relieving chambers above the King's Chamber don't actually relieve anything and that he and John had done the tests to prove it. His next revelation was that in his view, the King's Chamber and relieving chambers form a symbolic spine of the god Osiris. To back this up, he quoted utterance 600 of the pyramid texts which states that "This oh Horus, the pyramid, the place of sunrise and of sunset is Osiris". David pointed out some striking similarities between Osiris and Jesus. As examples he cited Osiris being crucified and rising from the dead, of him performing acts of healing, and of feeding people on a hill with a piece of bread and a fish. Piling on the similarities, David explained that Osiris was a greek word and that in the original egyptian form he was actually called Asar or Esau.
David and John used a process known as Cymatics to test the acoustics of the interior of the pyramid, this being the study of waveforms in pictorial fashion. A membrane was stretched over the King's Chamber sarcophagus onto which sand was sprinkled from a cappuccino chocolate shaker (!). When sound was directed at the membrane, instead of seeing the expected geometric waveforms they saw symbols from the ancient egyptian hieroglyphic language such as the eye of Ra, the eye of Horus, and the djed pillar of Osiris as well as many others. As David said, it was almost as if language itself had developed at these sites as a result of man's emotional response to them. David and his team have now developed a method of releasing memory in pictorial form from stone using the power of frequency and he hopes to be able to demonstrate the results of those experiments in the next year or so.
David believes that he has solved one of the major riddles of the Great Pyramid. By entering, one enters the body of Osiris and is reconciled with the divine. In David's words, "The egyptians believed as did many others that God was a unity. He was a unity of all things, he was consciousness, and that therefore by altering our consciousness here on this our home planet, we were given the ability to ascend, to become at one with the cosmos, with consciousness…".
David closed his lecture with a reference to another image that appeared on the sand. It was a nemes headdress similar to the blue and gold striped crown depicted on the death mask of Tutankhamun. At the time, he couldn't understand why such a picture had emerged amongst all the other images but now he thinks he has the answer. All matter in the universe is composed of an elementary state of gas known as plasma. Under laboratory conditions, the super-hot form of the gas has been shown to respond to conscious thought. An arabic friend told David recently that the ancient egyptian and arabic word for plasma is 'nemes'.
This was a highly enjoyable lecture by a presenter who had the audience in the palm of his hand from a very early stage. My curiosity to know more has been aroused and I for one shall certainly be reading his new book. I strongly recommend that you do the same.
Special thanks to Robert Camp, Hannah Hardiman, Nigel Skinner-Simpson, & Rob Speight, for their reviews of the Questing Conference.