The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World embody seven great works—like the Great Pyramids and ancient Pharos Lighthouse at Alexandria with its flashing beacon—built a few thousand years ago for all mankind to behold with awe. “That the Pharos was used as a signal-station as well as a lighthouse is certain,” wrote Dr. A. J. Butler, “and at the time of the Arab conquest it was in full working order and flashed the sun by day and its own fire by night many leagues over the sea.” He went on to claim in his exhaustive work titled The Arab Conquest of Egypt and the Last Thirty Years of Roman Dominion that it was a “conspicuous landmark visible by day and by night at a distance of sixty or seventy miles.”
One of the several interesting descriptions of the ancient lighthouse—quoted in The Electric Mirror on the Pharos Lighthouse and Other Ancient Lighting—is by Al Bakri, a medieval Arab traveler who carefully observed the Seventh Wonder of the World when the beautiful tower was still standing tall during his visit to Alexandria.
According to Larry Brian Radka’s translation of the French rendering of a rare, unpublished, ancient Arabic text, Al Bakri described the four-stage tower as follows:
“The Pharos today is composed of four stages. The first, of a rectangular design, is remarkably built in rectangular cut stones, of which the joints are so well concealed that the whole seems to be formed of a single block of stone, remaining insensible to the ravages of time. Its height is 320 cubits.
“At the top of the first stage, one is left with by each face of the building a space corresponding to the thickness of the wall, being eight spans, plus around ten extra cubits on the surface, which encloses the platform. One goes up to the second stage of the construction, which affects an octagonal plan, and a height of 80 cubits. On the periphery of the second platform, one is left with the space corresponding to the width of the wall of the second stage—plus eight cubits. And, from this enclosed surface, one ascends to a closing element of the construction, a rectangular design, with a height of around 50 cubits. At the top one finds a prayer chapel attributed to Solomon.
“On the northern face of the edifice is found an inscription in copper. No one has been able to decipher it, nor knows to what it corresponds. The door of the Pharos is of iron, and nobody knows when it was made. One goes up towards the door on departing from the foundation of the lighthouse by an inclined road, without noticing the incline. Likewise, one reaches the top of the first stage by an incline wide enough to permit the passage of two horsemen riding side by side, on ground appearing so flat that those who go up would not be able to say they are climbing or simply walking. At each of the bends of this incline is found a door to quarters, in the interior of which are found rooms ten to twenty cubits square, exposing garret-windows and vents designed to air out the smallest gust of wind against the lighthouse, which, without them, would run the risk of it collapsing. There are in the interior of the lighthouse 364 rooms. With regard to the bends of the ramp, they make up from bottom to top a total of 72, and each allows 12 steps [of progression]. All these rooms are covered with an arch of stones matched and cemented. The whole structure constituting the lighthouse has its components of masonry tied together by beams of teakwood.”
This lighthouse and other six wonders were, however, eclipsed further back in antiquity by more brilliant structures, divine structures, starry structures, hidden away now in the bowels of Earth—still furiously blazing away in the fiery abyss Christians call Hell—if one believes Scripture. The Book of Enoch—originally in the Bible but later replaced by the Book of Revelation—is one example among many so-called holy texts (quoted in Astronomical Revelations or 666) that attest to the inferno.
Chapter 18 of the 1838 edition of The Book of Enoch the Prophet, translated by Dr. Richard Laurence, the prophet describes the inferno on his visit there as follows:
“And there, I beheld seven stars, like great blazing mountains, and like spirits entreating me. Then the angel said: “This place, until the consummation of heaven and earth, will be the prison of stars, and the host of heaven. The stars which roll over fire are those which transgressed the commandment of God before their time arrived; for they came not in the proper season. Therefore was He offended with them, and bound them, until the period of the consummation of their crimes in the secret year.”
This primordial revelation in the holy Book of Enoch is confirmed by Luke 10:18 which claims, “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven.” But where did he and his followers go? The New Testament Book of II Peter answers the rest of the question by relating that “God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast then down to hell.” But where is hell? Satan speaks twice (Job 1:7 & 2:2) of “going to and fro in the earth” and of “walking up and down in it,” so hell must be down in the Earth. Ezekiel (31:15-16) also points in this direction, and adds a few more details on the fall of Satan and his angels into hell. While relaying the words of the Hebrew god Yahweh, he announces:
“Thus saith the LORD GOD;
In the Day when he [Satan] went down to the grave
I caused a morning: I covered the deep for him,
And I restrained the floods thereof,
And the great waters were stayed:
And I caused Lebanon to mourn for him,
And all the trees of the field fainted for him.
I made the nations to shake at the sound of his fall,
When I cast him down to hell
With them that descend into the pit . . . ”
He was obviously not speaking of Noah’s flood that was not restrained, but an event that occurred much earlier. Nevertheless, to add another scriptures to the list of holy evidence of the location of hell and the evil that resides there, we add John’s divine Revelation (12:9) at the end of the Bible, which avows that Satan “was cast out into the earth and his angels were cast out with him.”
Angels or gods—both messengers—were often synonymous in ancient times with the stars or fiery asteroids feared by the ancient Babylonians—feared enough to use incantations to counteract their diabolical machinations emanating from the seven evil stars down deep in the bowels of the Earth.
The following example, titled the “Incantation Against the Seven Fiery Phantoms,” was translated into English verse by Professor Louis Dyer of Harvard University:
Seven are they, they are seven;
In the caverns of ocean they dwell,
They are clothed in the lightnings of heaven,
Of their growth the deep waters can tell;
Seven are they, they are seven.
Broad is their way and their course is wide,
Where the seeds of destruction they sow,
O’er the tops of the hills where they stride,
To lay waste the smooth highways below,—
Broad is their way and their course is wide.
Man they are not, nor womankind,
For in fury they sweep from the main,
And have wedded no wife but the wind,
And no child have begotten but pain,—
Man they are not, nor womankind.
Fear is not in them, not awe;
Supplication they need not, nor prayer,
For they know no compassion nor law,
And are deaf to the cries of despair,—
Fear is not in them, not awe.
Curséd they are, they are curséd,
They are foes to wise Êa’s name;
By the whirlwind are all things dispersed,
On the paths of the flash of their flame,—
Curséd they are, they are curséd,
Spirit of Heaven, oh, help! Oh, Spirit of Earth!
They are seven, thrice said they are seven,
For the gods they are Bearers of Thrones,
But for men they are Breeders of Dearth,
And the authors of sorrows and moans.
They are seven, thrice said they are seven.
Spirit of Heaven, oh, help! Oh, Spirit of Earth!
The ancient Persians, who inherited the land of the Assyrians and Babylonians—descendants of the Sumerians—also had a healthy respect for these evil “Bearers of Thrones and Breeders of Dearth,” and also saw fit to leave us a record of their primordial plunge.
These ancient Aryans called Satan Ahriman, and in his Essentials of Demonology, Dr. Edward Langton maintains that
“In Persian teaching, Ahriman is identified, or at least associated, with the serpent. In Chapter 3 of the Bundahesh, it is said that the evil spirit sprang from heaven in the form of a serpent [undulating train of asteroids] and populated this world with biting, poisonous creatures, so that not even the space for a needle was left. He darkened the whole creation. The evil spirit proclaimed war against the whole of Ahura Masda’s [the great Creator’s] creatures. The defeat of the evil spirit [in the high heavens] is brought about by Ahura Mazda’s descent to earth. He [Ahriman] will be plunged into the deepest darkness, and will finally perish in the melted metal [in the molten core of the Earth—or Hell!].”
According to the six-century-BC Zoroastrian teachings, Angra Mainyu is the evil one who is the equivalent of the Great Red Dragon in John’s Revelation, who supervises a council of seven arch-demons. Referring to the later Persian texts of the Younger Avesta, Dr. Langton maintains, “With Angra Mainyu at the head, the names of these arch-demons are: Aka Manah, Indra, Sauru, Taurvi, Zairitsha, Naonhaithya, and Ahriman or Aeshma [Satan] vigorously reckoned as the seventh.”
These same arch celestial demons, known as the Maruts, seem to be referred to in the scriptures of another Aryan religion—that of the Hindus of India. “The religion of the Hindus is professedly founded upon the Vedas,” explains Thomas Bulfinch. “To these books of their scripture they attach the greatest sanctity, and state that Brahma himself composed them at the creation. But the present arrangement of the Vedas is attributed to the sage Vyasa, about five thousand years ago.”
Some of these prayers and hymns, called the Vedic Hymns in English, seem to vividly describe the arrival of Satan and his angels, and they, not unlike in Ezekiel’s prophecies, describe some of the destruction that they caused when they plunged into Hell. This is reflected in the following metrical lines that were translated and composed by Sir Monier Monier-Williams:
Armed for the conflict, see! The demons come—
Ahi and Vritra and a long array
Of darksome spirits. Quick then, quaff the draught
That stimulates thy martial energy
And dashing onward in the golden car
Drawn by the ruddy, Ribhu-fashioned steeds
Speed to the charge, escorted by the Maruts,
Vainly the demons dare thy might, in vain
Strive to deprive us of thy watery treasures.
Earth quakes beneath the crashing of thy bolts.
Pierced, shattered, lies the foe—cities crushed
His armies overthrown, his fortresses
Shivered to fragments . . .
“When you see your way through the clefts, you are like birds, O Maruts,” runs one of the lines from F. Max Muller’s translations of these Vedic hymns. And another hymn invites one to “Sing to the company of Maruts, growing up together, the strong among the divine host: they stir heaven and earth by their might, they mount up to the firmament from the abyss of Nirriti. Even your birth was with fire and fury, O Maruts! You terrible, wrathful, never tiring!”
Scientists believe the Earth's center is made of fiery molten metal so there may be reason to believe the ancients' "fire and fury" of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
But is it really possible though that some seven ancient stars or asteroids—wandering around Earth like those below—could penetrate deeply enough into the Earth to generate its red-hot hellish core? Well, if we judge by what NASA found on Mercury, we can easily believe some asteroids had the power to do so.
Between 1962 and 1975, the United States launched a series of unmanned spacecraft known as the Mariner probes, which gave us the first close-up pictures of Mercury, Venus, and Mars. On Mercury, with a molten interior like Earth, was discovered evidence of the near total destruction of an entire planet. Mariner 10 sent us pictures back of a hypervelocity impact crater that stretched nearly a thousand miles across the face of Mercury. The impact of the monstrous asteroid that blew out the hole was powerful enough to punch out mountains thousands of feet high on the other side. For much more on this subject, read Astronomical Revelations or 666.
For much more on the Pharos Lighthouse at Alexandria—and ancient technology—read The Electric Mirror on the Pharos Lighthouse and Other Ancient Lighting.
This page was last modified on Wednesday, August 18, 2010