What I learned from making The Revelation Of The Pyramids and BAM

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Ten years after THE REVELATION OF THE PYRAMIDS (LRDP), I made the movie BUILDERS OF THE ANCIENT MYSTERIES (BAM), in which Graham Hancock honored us with his participation. For the release of BAM in English (available on our English platform OKAST and on iTunes, Google Play and Amazon Prime), Graham asked me to share what I learned while working on these films.

In a few words, It totally changed my point of view on the world.

It all started in Paris, in 1999. At that time, as a director of commercials and music videos with the ambition to make movies, I was more interested in the future and its technology, which I believed would solve all of humanity’s problems, than in the past. And I was not at all interested in ancient archaeological sites. Since I had some time in-between shootings of commercials, I started to read more and more.

One book leading to another, I discovered all sorts of subjects, until one day I crossed paths with someone who introduced me to “hermetic philosophy”, alchemy and other ancient disciplines, totally unknown to me. A few months later, this same person presented me with a compilation of facts concerning the archaeological enigmas of our planet, ranging from hermetic writings to contemporary works… I was totally unaware that some researchers were contesting a truth learned at school and this is how a bulimia of reading on the subject started, it would last for six years and would occupy most of my free time.

To say the least, there is a world between these two worlds, and this is what drove me to visit Egypt for the first time in 2005, where I got the slap of my life.

Visiting daily the site of Giza for nearly 10 days, then visiting Abu Ghurab, Abusir, Saqqarah, Dahshur and finally the Cairo Museum, I had a very strong intuition that something important was at stake, mainly because of the enigma of the pyramids of Giza, the most gigantic constructions of Antiquity, and the wake-up call was so strong that it swept away all of my fiction projects. It took me 5 years to find the funding and to make LRDP. (Note: the original English version is the one narrated by a woman with a French accent, not the one by Brian Cox, whose commentary was modified without my consent).

Investigating is one thing, but delivering your work to the public is another. I was naively thinking that archaeologists and Egyptologists would consider the facts presented, but nothing of the sort happened. Even though the public loved the form of the film, different from usual documentaries, some archaeologists could not go beyond it and reproached it to me violently.

But it wasn’t just a matter of form, it was deeper than that.

I thus discovered that questioning the practicality of the methods that used to be implemented to pile up the immense limestone blocks, of several hundreds of tons for some, which compose the enclosing wall of the Temple of the Valley of Giza, covered with massive facings of granite coming from Aswan, to nearly 900 km in the south, was considered as a suspicious act.

So was pointing out that the lintels of this same granite, which forms the ceiling of the high chamber of the great pyramid weigh up to 70 tons and are at more than 40 m of altitude… also that this chamber is precisely horizontal and vertical… nothing helped, because we were no longer on the ground of reason – if we ever were concerning this subject of study – but rather on the ground of emotion, where stood on one side those who accepted to consider the question and on the other side, those who rejected everything in a very aggressive and virulent way in a kind of 2. 0 crusade, both forming two distinct camps on social media. No curious exchange between them, no serene debate, forums were accumulating thousands of messages where insult and contempt became the rule, far from the conversations between Plato and his detractors, whose goal was for the whole assembly to elevate, not to put down the other to appear higher! Thousands of years of language evolution have led to such a binary radicalization of exchanges: true or false, in favor or against, good or bad, black or white, man or woman… Hasn’t humanity learned from its past mistakes? What is the use of History if not, at least, to help us evolve?

I spent two years answering all the messages, comments, articles and blogs that talked about LRDP, good or bad but flabbergasted by some impossible dialogues, I came out of it more than circumspect and determined to go back to my copy.

It was time to learn from this experience and to make a film again, to show in a different way, more precisely… Although I was very interested in hermetic texts and in what esotericism could say about the past of Humanity, my approach has always been pragmatic and based on facts. It is through them that I entered the subject and I remain convinced that it’s also through them that we will come to understand the thoughts of the creators of those sites, by thinking “outside the box”. By practising the tabula rasa of the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes, which allows you to start again from scratch, to consider the enigma under new angles, without preconceived ideas.

I decided to keep what was the most solid, to surround myself with versatile and competent people to explore the sites with the best measuring equipment. Doctor Érik Gonthier, a geologist of the Museum of Man in Paris, was happy to go back to those sites to observe more precisely and to make sure we do not omit anything, moved by the idea that “a science will recognize another science”.
A production company joined us by providing two operators, cameras and a drone, and we launched a crowdfunding: 3,000 contributors followed us and we went back filming the first part, without knowing exactly how we would be able to finance the entire film. But the magic happened again and thanks to our conferences, screenings, and the sale of books and DVDs, we were finally able to produce BUILDERS OF THE ANCIENT MYSTERIES (BAM).

Change of form and tone, freedom to formulate a hypothesis allowing us to explain more rationally all these similarities observed between different ancient sites:

– New speakers more specialized in their fields

– The contrast between the reality of the Easter Island sites and the current hypotheses

– The study of two different architectural styles on the main sites of Peru

– The peaceful city of Caral Supe, Peru, 3,000 years B.C., which would have lived nearly 1,200 years in peace, without defensive weapons

– Gobekli Tepe in Turkey with Graham Hancock and the French researcher Bleuette Diot – The caves of Barabar in India with Erik Gonthier

– A detailed presentation of the Antikythera mechanism, thanks to private research conducted by the Swiss company Hublot

– A reflection on the origin of the Egyptian royal cubit and its link with the medieval royal cubit imposed by the French Royalty both including Pi, the Golden Number… and the meter

– The Presence of the meter in Puma Punku in Bolivia, Egypt and France in the 12th century

– The use of powerful measuring devices such as the rugosimeter (surface analysis) used in Puma Punku, in the tanks of the Serapeum in Egypt and in Barabar in India, and the use of 3D SCAN for the caves of Barabar

– The use of drones to place the sites in their global context

– The precision of the hypothesis of an earlier civilization which would have collapsed during the Younger Dryas.

So much for BAM’s big points. Feedback?
Very good general reception from the French public, which has grown considerably thanks to its multiple broadcasts on the RMC Découverte channel.

But no change among the “skeptics”, who continued to reject everything in block using the same arguments they used for LRDP… no more open and respectful exchanges with archaeologists, or even any interest concerning our data.

In France, LRDP holds the historic audience score of RMC Découverte, it has made millions of views on YouTube, but the media only talked about it on two or three occasions, in very bad terms. In one of the rare articles, an archaeologist from the CNRS (French National Center for Scientific Research) bluntly accused it of “secretly conveying the theses of Nazism”! let’s not exaggerate.

‘LOL’, as my daughter would say. Except now they weren’t really ‘LOL’ anymore. Why such a disproportionate reaction?

I then started to seriously wonder about the basic problem, the one at the origin of such violence. In the end, why should the idea of a human civilization more advanced than we think, in a past more distant than we imagine, be so disturbing?

The problem with beliefs is that they lead us believe that our belief is the only truth: what others believe necessarily becomes “a belief” while what we believe represents “The Truth”. From this prism, if someone contradicts what we believe to be true, then it seems vital to remove this threat or even destroy it, depending on the power of our belief.

Like Truman Burbank on his boat in Peter Weir’s excellent film “THE TRUMAN SHOW,” our ship had simply collided with one of our society’s invisible boundaries.

Borders set by a History that hates to be disturbed, which composes the foundation and the pillar of the current geopolitical “balance” of our world.

If someone dared to question history, he was necessarily driven by bad intents: an enemy of democracy and progress driven by obscure or unspeakable goals!

Behind this frontier, I discovered a quite dangerous ideology, based on the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, “Man is a wolf to Man” consisting of considering the Human as bad by essence… a philosophy adapted to their profit by some economists.

Reason for which the people must, according to them, be directed by an iron hand in a velvet glove, exchanging at the same time freedom against safety. What one resigns to accept when one is afraid and has bad esteem of himself.

2 000 years of Catholicism had already largely contributed to the promotion of this ideology, particularly by empowering the perverse idea that the origin of evil within us would have been inherited by the parents of Humanity… this said without the will to wound the religious faithful ones, but rather to question the interpretation of the texts and their psychological consequences.

Archaeology also came to complete this sad picture, by one of its branches convinced that the civilization would be born of the fear: the first humans would have gathered in tribes by fear of the predators, so many animals than other humans, in defensive cities.

Not because it was easier and more enjoyable together, no: out of fear.

What Caral Supe contradicts, and probably Mohenjo Daro as well, a contemporary twin from the other side of the world, from -3,000 to -1,800 BC… In this case, the least we can say is that both humans and time have not helped us to have a clearer vision of our past: the first having the annoying habit of rebuilding over the same place and, for the most bellicose of our ancestors, destroying the culture of those whom they subjected by force; while the second sends everything back to dust.

In the corridors of the Natural History Museum of Paris, I crossed paths with a geneticist in 2013, who replied to me as I asked her about the Synthetic Theory of Evolution: “ah but Darwinism is politics, young man! “. On second thought, perhaps it has indeed morphed into an ideology over time.

Let’s try to take a step back and consider what you Anglo-Saxons call the “Big Picture”.

Here, broadly speaking, is the narrative admitted and accepted by the modern world: “human beings came together out of FEAR, to protect themselves from predators and a HOSTILE, CRUEL AND RUTHLESS nature, from which they wisely extracted themselves by FIGHTING to create CIVILIZATION. “

Masterfully exposed in Ishmael, by the American Daniel Quinn, through the story of “mother culture”, this particular narrative will orient our reflection: “we’ve always fought, it’s perfectly normal that we’re still fighting”, “human beings are like that, greedy, belligerent and selfish”, “war is a necessary evil”, “if the world is rotten, it’s because human beings are rotten” and, icing on the cake, among some economists: “there’s nothing like a good war to boost the economy”! Such disconnection from reality sends shivers down the spine of those who have a minimum of empathy for the human race, but this salutary quality seems to be considered a flaw in the ranks of finance because, during this time, the war business brings in a lot of money, it is by far the most profitable sector of the world economy, well beyond energy, which comes in second place. “Follow the money”, as they say.

Do you honestly think this ultra-profitable business will stop?
The more weapons are sold, the more conflicts there are… and vice versa: world peace is logically not part of the program.

How can we not rebel against such a thing? First of all, because it is not shouted from the rooftops or reminded every evening on the news, everyone quietly doing their little business in the world market. And perhaps also because, having been bathed since childhood in this expansionist warrior ideology that deeply impregnates Western culture, it doesn’t even shock us anymore. Because in the West, war is central. We learn from elementary school the story supporting this fairy tale of the almost naked nomad who would have settled in Sumer, to end up, after centuries of nameless barbarism made of conquests, wars and crusades, is the savage in the costume of the GAFAM Era.

Why are we so warlike? Is it because we are convinced that we have always been?

This is where the notion of “forever” comes in: we are talking about History as covering a ridiculously short period of time, a few thousand years, compared to the actual age of Homo Sapiens, which has recently been put back to about 300,000 years!

Although it is only an opinion, it seems to me, difficult to consider that the human, as creative and adventurous as we know him, who had the audacity and the strength to travel the planet on foot, braving extreme and radical conditions compared to those of his home of origin, would have remained a hunter-gatherer living half-naked in small tribes, having rudimentary dialects, during 290 000 years, before one fine day suddenly deciding to become farmer-breeder in Sumer, in ancient Iraq. During all this time, no human would have discovered the principle of the wheel for example? No Archimedes or Leonardo da Vinci of the ancient times could have hatched during these millennia and allowed some technical advances like those which led us, in a short period of time, to the industrial revolution? 290 000 years is an extraordinarily long duration…

Difficult to consider indeed, especially as our knowledge progresses concerning our prehistoric ancestors gradually forces us to reconsider the status of the Neanderthal, partly mixed with Sapiens. The fact is, history is being written by the victors, I come to agree with Graham Hancock’s thought, and that of Immanuel Velikovsky: all the alterations undergone throughout the ages would have finally turned us into a ” species with amnesia”.

Not being able to project ourselves into the future without knowing our past and who we really are, the question appears to be all the more important.

One can consider everything, from extraterrestrial gods to multi-millennial secret societies, guarantors of the good functioning of Humanity, going through giant blocks put in place by levitation processes or even a great pyramid that would stabilize the earth’s crust: between those who do not know but affirm, those who would know but keep silent, those who would know and speak… in a little more than 20 years, I have heard all sorts of peremptory affirmations. By following these tracks, one would only replace a belief with another, which would be of no interest to me. I prefer to put my energy into understanding these buildings and trying to show their beauty and technicality, because beauty attracts beauty, and one day, all of this will appear as obvious to everyone.

The irony is that it would seem that the builders have placed us in the same position in which, if the legend is true, their ancestors once found themselves as they questioned the origin of the world.

Hermetic texts, named after the god Hermes of the Greeks – Thot of the Egyptians and Mercury of the Romans – times when they would have been fixed in writing – and then later works dealing with alchemy, evoke cycles governing the development of Humanity and different ages through which it should pass in order to evolve as a civilization. An idea difficult to accept that also appears among the Mayas, with their “fifth sun”, and in India, with different durations, but the idea of cycles remains present. There is talk of a golden age of the Earth to come, after a dark period.

Ancient prophecies seem to describe our time with surprising acuity if they can be given any credibility. But what is most interesting is the way in which these ancient Hermetic scholars seem to have conceived “creation”: they would have become deists by reflection after a careful observation of nature, and not by revelation, as is the case with our religions.

Through research, they would have come to the conclusion of the existence of human transcendence: ‘God’ discovered by science.

It is a question of “deism” which must be differentiated from “theism”, proper to the “revealed” religions: if deism considers a “creative principle” at the origin of the initial conditions of our universe, which would have left us all freedom of evolution by the use of our free will and discernment, theism has humanized and paternalized this principle, and it is this patriarchal figure that we find in the revealed religions known as “of the Book” (Torah, Bible, Quran).

For theism, this creative principle, which became “God”, would have made Man in its image and would intervene in the proper course of human life through revelations, apparitions, commandments and prophets, which raises, among other things, the important question of individual responsibility.

Theism and its opposite, atheism, are both beliefs because they are not supported by any tangible elements or evidence. And the difficulty is that this opposition of theism to atheism leads to a polarization of the debate, which in the end seems to leave us with no choice but to believe in God or to be an atheist… Is there no other way?

A way leading to the deism of the ancients, fruit of a deepened research by the relentless observation of the principles of the living, considered in its globality, appeared to me, interesting to explore if only to better appreciate its complex beauty and the unique and precious characteristics of life.

What could our Elders have seen that led them to the conclusion of a creative principle, considered as naïve by a majority of scientists in the West?

That everything appeared to be made up of cycles that were imbricated within each other, from those of the stars to those of the reproduction of species, like a gigantic cosmic clock. That numbers, hidden in patterns belonging to an invisible geometrical order, seemed to form a weft on which reality was woven.

By a simple glance on the living, the glance of a curious child, they noticed for example that the vegetal life had its mouth – the root system – in the bottom, and its sex – the flower – on top; that this vertical axis rotates to 90 degrees for the animal, for which the mouth and the sex aligned on a horizontal plane, while for the human, it rotates again of 90°, with the sex in the bottom and the mouth in the top, which appeared to be the expression of a geometry following an order.

They also discovered the expression of “polarities”, natural complementary oppositions, forces necessary for the creation of the movement essential to life, in perpetual dynamic balance. For example, the tree was immobile while the human was mobile; during the day, the tree transformed carbon dioxide into oxygen, while the human did the opposite; the human’s “lung tree” appeared inverted in comparison to the tree; the red of the blood was the complementary color of the green of the sap: a “fresh” way to look at the world.

Another example with the masculine and feminine, materialized in the human in a more concrete way through the man and the woman – each them possessing, as Jung would later work on, those two principles in them – which could also be geometrized: the man, wider at the shoulders, was represented by an equilateral triangle pointing downwards, while the woman, wider at the pelvis, was represented by a triangle pointing upwards; when the man had his genitals close to the outside, in the woman they were spread out and inside; when the testicles were the coldest part of the male body, the ovaries constituted the hottest part; when in the man the expensive production of spermatozoids began at puberty and never ended, the production of ovules was limited to a little more than 400 cycles between puberty and menopause; when the spermatozoids were the smallest mobile cells, while the ovules constituted the largest immobile cells; when during the sexual act, the man’s sex hardened, the woman’s softened… everything appeared to be opposite, but with a sense of complementary, the association of both forming a unity. The point is not to do the apology of heterosexuality, because it is a question of male and female principles, the man being considered male outside and female inside and the other way around for the woman, but as nothing is ever either black or white – represented by the Yin-Yang of the Asians – the individuals were allocated somewhere on a long axis bordered by these two polarities, being a little more this and a little less that, the important thing in any couple, considered within the framework of spiritual development, being the balance of these principles.

They finally noticed the recurrence of the Golden Number in nature – renamed “divine proportion” in the Middle Ages – manifested by the ratios in the productions of its different kingdoms, mineral, vegetable and animal, to which the human being belonged and around which all living things were visibly organized in an unequalled beauty and perfection. They naturally concluded that if this gigantic cosmic clock was so perfectly regulated, it must have been the work of a great cosmic watchmaker.

They thus observed that reality, which unfolded in time and space, appeared to be woven on a carefully ordered geometrical framework. They said to themselves that if there was an order prior to reality, it was that it necessarily emanated from a will, resulting from a primordial intention. They baptized the author of this intention “the Whole”, that “any name decreases”, the “will which makes that the universe is, whereas it could not be”.

If this great clockmaker had not manifested himself to them, it was probably because he wanted them to be more interested in his work than in himself… from then on, they studied the laws and principles that were governing this great clock, in order to understand the meaning of their existence and to find their rightful place in it.

This could explain why the site of Giza is not signed and why I made this remark before going into this subject: an object this large without signatures, presenting dimensions far from being random when considered with a free eye… would it not be the same quality of observation that we are invited to have on this building?

I don’t know why they decided to incorporate the doctrine of reincarnation, called “transmigration of souls”, but if I had to choose between all the possible beliefs, I must confess that this one, excluding any racism or sexism, seems to me, the most attractive, and if I had to believe in something, I would gladly adopt it for the perspective on life and empathy toward others that it offers.

All of this would certainly deserve further development and does not call for approval and signature at the bottom of the page. I am not a hermeticist and I do not belong to any secret order: I am only giving you my interpretation of this spiritual and scientific philosophy, which is not a dogma, and which does not aim to tell you the truth but to put you in an intellectual position that will allow you to find your way to the truth. For so many things have been said in the name of hermeticism that we must remain vigilant in front of all those who claim to be from this chain of transmission and bearers of thousand-year-old secrets, which they often struggle to formulate simply… or who spread eugenic or racist ideas: such nonsense, is enough to invalidate them and it is, among other things, what made me turn away irreparably from the one who had nevertheless made me discover this magnificent subject.

Hermeticism is not a religion, it is based on principles and not on rules: as soon as writings are proposed as the only expression of the truth, then dogma is not very far. This is why the ancients did not write down these teachings, or else in a hieroglyphic or ideographic manner, a richer expression, which was accompanied by oral transmission. For them, “if the spirit vivifies, the letter kills”, we can indeed observe this with the religious texts to which we manage to make say or justify almost anything we want, even murder, even though it is expressly condemned by all the gods of the Earth.

So by the measure of what I have glimpsed of that distant past, here is what I have learned and understood while working on these films.

It seemed to me that what the builders of pyramids and temples had in heart while carrying out their works, is to register in the plan of the “All” such as they had understood it. To assemble rocks in the manner of matter by nature, respecting a geometrical order invisible to the eyes of flesh, but visible to those of the spirit, in other words, to the intelligence of the observer! Also by using the ratio of the Golden Number, which also has the characteristic of giving the buildings anti-seismic properties: when science and spirituality meet…

I had never really thought about the question of the transcendence of the human being before this subject pushed me to do so. Over the years, the idea of a creative intelligence at the origin of everything gradually caught my attention and opened me to the idea of a “conscious universe” in which our human consciousnesses would bathe. This seems to be what the Shamans of the Earth have always told us, as illustrated by Teilhard de Chardin’s “Noosphere” or the “Soul of the World” of the Hermetists. For them, as individual entities, we would be nourishing, by the whole of our human experiences, a kind of “central brain” of our species, which would appear as a vulgar New Age gibberish to the eyes of all the followers of the creative brain and unique container of the phenomenon of consciousness.

The origin and the cause of the consciousness still constitute a big point of stumbling between modern scientists and those of the ancient world, the first thinking that the consciousness would be the product of the brain, while for the second, the brain would filter it because it would be everywhere.

For the ancients, within beauty, considered as aesthetics with meaning, lies the signature of this creative consciousness, for in a solely mechanistic world it would have no use.
Chance or intention – this is the great question that divides the human race.

This subject pushed me to consider things beyond their appearances, to not forbid myself any question, even the most far-fetched; to make a clear distinction between belief and faith: while the first imposes, the second proposes. To open wide this door, used by our ancestors for millennia, and in which science is now tiptoeing: the door of consciousness, which probably has to do with one of the functions of these buildings, because the ultimate development, the most useful, is it not the development of the human?

The effectiveness of multi-millennial breathing and physical exercise techniques, such as those of India for example, which our science is rediscovering, demonstrate an extensive knowledge coming from the distant past. Here again, two choices seem to be offered to us: the passive one of transhumanism, and the active one of rediscovering this ancestral wisdom, and their practices carefully regulated and codified by millennia of experimentation.

An organism boosted from the outside or from the inside: a choice driven by fear or love?

Our present Humanity, which despises the word of its elders, which is preoccupied only by the satisfaction of its desires and the search for pleasures, which believes itself to be immortal and doesn’t care about the future, is adolescent in many ways. Careful rationality leads us to the clear conclusion that it must grow up urgently and reconcile itself with its nourishing mother, if it wants to finally become an adult, to enter a Golden Age described by the ancient texts. Urgent, because if she doesn’t manage to do so with almost 8 billion souls, it will be even more complicated with 12 billion.

No one will come to save us, no one will tell us how to proceed, true spirituality has taught this for a long time. The help will not come from a messiah, nor from the time which solves all, nor from a providential Man or even from the galactic confederation, but from each one of us, because our present Humanity is only the reflection of all its parts.

« After months of chasing these birds around Lough Ennell, Co. Westmeath. James Crombie and I captured a unique display. His shot made front cover of the Irish Times and this is the video of the murmuration behind that iconic photograph. »

Change can only come from within each of us. The discovery of the practical spirituality of the ancients, and the exciting work of exploration of consciousness undertaken by the moderns, foreshadows a new era. Through greater awareness of our actions and their consequences, the guilt and infantilization of people by centralized and autocratic powers will disappear for more empathy and individual responsibility and naturally lead to a more equitable society. Utopian, perhaps… but not impossible.

Especially if we discover that we have not always been warlike and selfish and that we are far from being inherently evil: we have simply left our power in the hands of unworthy leaders.

If for the academic archaeologists, the reason of the great pyramid – a tomb – or the meaning of the caves of Barabar – shelters “anti monsoon” – is quite found, the independent researchers do not oversimplify the work, because not having a preconceived idea about the goal of these achievements raises more interrogations, some of them quite concrete.

When we cease to consider that the excessive complexity of realization of these buildings would be the result of a whim or a royal wish carried out by an enslaved people, then it becomes necessary to ask questions about the use of the granite for the high room of the big pyramid for example, knowing that the heterogeneity and the hardness of this material make it difficult to work on, as well as the difficulties of routing of these blocks of 70 tons coming from a site to 900 km. Intuition leads us to look for a more pragmatic reason.

When we realize that it is about the same material found in the caves of Barabar in India, where we also find the expression, perhaps fortuitous, of dimensions in the metric system, we can emit the hypothesis of a common origin of the knowledge, which studies will have to confirm. We are going to explore these caves in their entirety in a future film which will be totally dedicated to them, because they have the potential to demonstrate, before further developments, the use of powerful means of cutting and also of measuring precision during the elaboration of these complex volumes in negative. The last sound measurements carried out in March 2020, just before the lockdown, already shows astonishing, and apparently recurrent, acoustic properties: what could these frequencies be used for?

As a scriptwriter, I have no difficulty in considering all the hypotheses, even those absurd in appearance, because if intuition guides, it is the reason that must validate; the fact that these hypotheses concern reality interests me even more because we all feel that it goes far beyond fiction.

I hope you will enjoy discovering BAM,
Thank you for your interest ?
Patrice Pouillard

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