7.6 /10 1 Votes
Country United Kingdom Subject History Media type Print (Hardback) Originally published 1996 Genre Non-fiction OCLC 35205669 | 3.8/5 Goodreads Language English Publication date 1996 Pages 294 pp Publisher Virgin Books | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Similar Colin Wilson books, Egypt books, Knowledge books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
From Atlantis to the Sphinx is a work of non-fiction by British author, Colin Wilson, with the subheading Recovering the Lost Wisdom of the Ancient World.
Wilson proposes in the text that the Great Sphinx of Giza was constructed by a technologically advanced people "nearly 10,000 years before Egyptologists have hypothesized" by the same people who provided plans for the construction of the pyramids of Egypt, Central and South America.
Overview
The book explores the connection between astronomy and mythology, arguing that ancient man used "Lunar knowledge" (intuition) as opposed to modern man's "Solar knowledge" (logic) to interpret the universe and therefore possessed an entirely different but equally valid mentality from that of modern man. Wilson proposes that the outlook of ancient man was based on "seeing the big picture" rather than logically breaking down the universe into its constituent parts.
Wilson develops this idea of civilisations founded on Lunar Knowledge together with astronomy to explain the monumental and seemingly spontaneous achievements of ancient cultures such as the Pyramid Complex at Giza in Egypt.
Wilson argues that the essential weakness of James Frazer's The Golden Bough is that Frazer attributed the fundamental mythological systems to the beginnings of the farming cultures, specifically to fertility. Agreeing with Giorgio de Santillana's thesis developed in Hamlet's Mill, Wilson places the genesis of mythology previous to fertility cultures, linking the fundamental myths to astronomical occurrences such as the Precession of the Equinoxes.
The main observations drawn by Wilson are that our ancient pre-Homo sapiens ancestors possessed intelligence equal to that of modern man, their apparent lack of technological achievement being explained by the needlessness of it based on their completely different, intuitive and all-embracing mentality. Over time, a more logical and dissecting mentality evolved leading to the traits which mark modern civilisations.