Archaeotrek
Can The Alignments of the Giza Pyramids be Explained from Moundville, Alabama Artifacts?—Part 3 (End)
By Dr. Greg Little
In part 1 and part 2 of this article the ancient Native American beliefs about death and the journey taken by the soul were briefly explained. These beliefs have been better understood in recent years through analysis of artifacts recovered at Moundville, Alabama and related mound sites. The artifacts are part of the Southern Death Cult, now referred to as the Southern Ceremonial Complex. The massive mound sites where the artifacts were excavated are part of the Mississippian Culture, a culture that erected enormous pyramid mounds and earthworks from about A.D. 900 until 1500. The Mississippians were descendants of the earlier Hopewell and Adena mound cultures.
In brief, after death, the soul takes a journey back to the stars with a specific destination as the goal. This destination is a bright star that is the location of a hole through the sky world. The soul’s journey begins toward the west, toward the setting sun, and takes at least 4 days. But at the end of the journey the soul stands at the edge of the earth and the watery underworld stretching out below. To reach the realm of the dead, the soul had to make a leap of faith from the edge of the earth into the night sky during a brief window of time. The leap was to a stellar portal that was about to sink below the horizon and is in the constellation known to Native Americans as the “Hand.” The Hand Constellation is actually the bottom of Orion with the three belt stars of Orion representing a severed wrist. The actual portal is known today as Messier 42, a fuzzy galaxy located below and left of the belt stars. If the soul successfully makes the perilous leap to the portal in the Hand, it gains access to the Milky Way, known as the Path or River of Souls. (Souls that fail to make the leap are destined to fall into the underworld ruled by the Constellation Scorpio, which was seen as a feathered serpent. This aspect is just as fascinating but will not be addressed here.)
The soul’s journey on the Milky Way is to the south. Once the soul reaches the area known as the Dark Rift, a choice point is encountered. The Dark Rift is a split in the Milky Way with one path a “dead end” and the other continuing. In essence, this choice point is a “fork” in the path and is represented in iconography as a raptor bird figure with a forked eye. Souls that choose the wrong path are obliterated by a guardian (the raptor). Those that choose the correct path reach the star Deneb, the brightest star of the Constellation of Cygnus. Through Deneb, the souls essentially move through a hole in the sky into the realm of the dead, where the soul’s ancestors wait.
It is clear that several US mound complexes were constructed with stellar alignments as their plan and that some mounds and earthworks were constructed as a ritualistic “machine” of earth that aided the dead on their path. There are dozens of books on this topic written by dozens of mainstream archaeologists that accept the stellar alignments.
Orion & Cygnus at Giza
For some time there has been a debate regarding the master plan that laid out the pyramid complex at Giza in Egypt. In 1994 Robert Bauval and Adrian Gilbert proposed that the three belt stars of Orion were the template for the three main Giza pyramids. Despite varied criticisms the idea has gained many supporters. One of their major points is that the southern shaft running from the King’s Chamber pointed to one of the Orion Belt stars in 2500 B.C., the generally accepted date of the construction of the Great Pyramid. However, in order to make the three stars of Orion “fit” the pyramids, it was necessary to flip the image of Orion. Even then, it was a poor fit. However, it is clear that Orion played a key role in Egyptian ideas of the afterlife, but the assertion that the three pyramids being built to depict Orion is dubious for a simple reason: they don’t really fit. If you make the stars bigger through time-lapse photography they become so large that they will cover the pyramids, but if you use the actual stars, one doesn’t even touch the third pyramid.
In “The Cygnus Mystery” (2006) and “Beneath the Pyramids” (2009) Andrew Collins showed that the three main cross stars of the Cygnus Constellation fit the three pyramids at Giza almost perfectly. In fact, Collins himself asserted that it was not a perfect alignment, but further analysis has shown the fit is better than initially thought. Collins (working with Rodney Hale and Nigel Skinner-Simpson) went on to discover places on the Giza plateau that corresponded to other key stars in the Cygnus Constellation. They found ground openings and a cave system that generally corresponded with these stars. In addition, they found several other key visual alignments with Cygnus on the Giza Plateau. The cave system they discovered, essentially by following the layout of Cygnus at the site, Collins saw as a representation of the realm of the dead, an underworld.
One of the most odd omissions that emerged from the work of Bauval and Gilbert, and later added to by Graham Hancock, is that their presentations in their many books seemingly ignore other important elements in the sky when they assert that Orion was targeted by the pyramids. One important glaring omission is that when Orion was being targeted by the southern shaft from the Great Pyramid’s King’s Chamber, what else important could have been in the sky? In fact, as Collins showed in Beneath the Pyramids, in 2500 B.C. (when Orion was targeted by the southern shaft of the King’s Chamber) Deneb and the Cygnus Constellation was directly above the Great Pyramid.
In essence, what may have been happening at Giza is something nearly identical to the rituals being conducted by America’s Mound Builders. The soul of the pharaoh was targeted to Orion (perhaps even Messier 42) through the southern King’s Chamber shaft. This occurred just before dawn (same as with Native American’s beliefs). Cygnus was directly over the pyramids at midnight each night. Once this portal (orion) was reached, the soul was given access to the Milky Way to make its way to Cygnus (directly overhead). As with the Native American beliefs, tools were needed by the soul and tests were made of the soul. Thus, in this view, the Great Pyramid targeted Orion at a very specific time, but the pyramids were designed to reflect Cygnus.
Thanks to Rodney Hale for verifying my own stellar calculations for this article. I used Starry Night Pro as the computer program.
