There are tens of thousands of pyramids and earthen mounds scattered all over the world. They remain a mystery. Archaeocryptographer Carl Munck (a retired USAF colonel who has earned a considerable reputation in the ancient mysteries underground) says we lack suitable answers to these enigmatic monuments because we have been asking the wrong questions.

In 1982 Munck read that Edgar Cayce, in response to the question, will we ever find out what the Great Pyramid was all about, replied that we must first understand the mathematical precessions of the earth.

To Munck, that meant two things: math, and maps. And the right questions: why are the monuments where they are, designed the way they are. This approach led Munck to a simple formula which he believes the monument architects used to place and design various temples.

The Elements of This System:

1) architecture, Count the number of corners, terraces, steps, and other obvious features.

2) location, the degrees, minutes, and seconds of latitude and longitude. But first, adjust the longitude to the ancient orientation of placing the Prime Meridian, or 0 degrees, running right through Giza, Egypt. Giza was likely chosen because it lies at the geographical center of the world's land mass, and because the Nile runs conveniently North to South along that imaginary longitude line.

THE WRITING IN THE WALL

I asked Munck to decode the simplest of the pyramids for illustration in this article. He chose the Kukulkan Pyramid at Chichen Itza in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico:

Like the other pyramids of the Western Hemisphere, the Kukulkan Pyramid at Chichen Itza is a terraced monument, as opposed to being a true pyramid form such as we see in Egypt.

In the picture above notice that the pyramid shows us nine terraces. This is the first number we use to assemble our formula for the decoding process.

The second number is 365, Kukulkan has four staircases, one on each side of the monument, on each staircase are 91 steps. For the four, that totals 364 steps with the top platform of the pyramid being the 365th step, giving us our second number, 365. There are four sides, and four staircases. We now have all the numbers shown by the architect and can put the decoding formula together: 9 terraces x 365 steps x 4 sides x 4 stairways = 52,560; 52,560 is also arrived at by multiplying the numbers given in the ancient grid coordinates for Kukulkan: 119 degrees x 42 minutes x 10.51620648 seconds = 52,560.

When the world's pyramids were built, their longitudes were reckoned from a very ancient Prime Meridian (0/360 ° longitude) that ran from pole to pole across the Great Pyramid at Giza. This a full 31 degrees, 08 minutes, 00.8 seconds to the east or our modern Greenwich Prime Meridian. (Factor in the 31 ° 08 00.8" longitudinal variance.)

Hence, those other three numbers of 119, 42, and 10.51620648 shown above, are the elements of Kukulkan's original longitude which multiply to its GRID longitude which was left to us in the 4-4-9-365 message conveyed by the Kukulkan itself. Kukulkan shows us where it is.

And if Munck is right, so do a number of other pyramids and earthen mounds. So far, he's decoded 270 earth mounds and pyramids, some of which require factoring in multiples of Pi and numerical constants.

MEANINGLESS COINCIDENCE?

A recent radio interview with Munck elicited this astute response from a listener: ...if one looks for mathematical coincidences, they're not hard to find. In his book Flim Flam!, professional skeptic James Randi points out that the Washington Monument is 555 feet five inches high, the base is 55 square feet, the windows are 500 feet from the base. Multiply five times the number of months in the year by the base, and you get 3,300, the weight of the capstone.

While five's are much easier to find than a matching set of 52,560, I agree that you can play around with numbers to come up with those you need for just about any intended meaning. But the question here is not if you and I can do this, but did the ancient builders intend to do this? is there a hidden message numerically encrypted? If so, then it means that a well-established grid system was shared by the Americas, Europe and Egypt; that once a temple site was selected, the architects checked the grid, multiplied out the three numbers of the coordinates, then back engineered a design whose features suggested numbers multiplied out to that same product.

In the case of Stonehenge, it might explain why the circle of standing perimeter stones numbers exactly 60. Stonehenge is located at 51 degrees, 10 minutes, and 42.35294118 seconds North Latitude: 51 x 10 x 42.3529 = 21,600. Applying The Code, 60 stones x 360 degrees in a circle = 21,600. Calling this intentional, and not mere coincidence, would be consistent with the ancient fascination with numbers.

NUMBERS ARE WORDS

To understand the importance that numbers held for the ancient mind set, Munck quotes Shaman Hannah on an ancient science called Gematria:

Today we view numbers as merely an expression of quantity. To the ancients, every number had its own character and identity; a place in an arithmetic chain that leads from one dimension of understanding to another. This extraordinary system of arithmetic, or concealed geometry, form the link between the languages of literature and mathematics....ancient literature, metrology, (the system of measures) and Sacred geometry can be viewed with new eyes. With numbers...cryptography becomes the law. Biblical numbers and structure dimensions become alphabetical statements. The WORD (number) becomes FLESH (dimensional) for numbers are words.

In his book, The Code, Munck writes, the pyramids are where they are, the maps which answer them are satellite accurate, and the eternal language of mathematics is allowing them to talk to us. There is nothing we can do about it, we're stuck with it.

I wonder why ancient temple architects would want to encode the temple's grid coordinates, if that's all it's about, why not just look at a map to read its place on the grid? I believe we are practical creatures who don't go to such bother unless there is a real purpose. So, there must be something more to this. Munck concurs. If you stop and think, you'll understand the wisdom to that. There's a plan here. Maps and math are the perfect code for a computer. No batteries required. Now I'm trying to find out what it means.

It could mean marking the hiding place of the legendary Hall of Records, which Munck suspects may be located at 29 degrees, 58 minutes, 36.58 seconds North and 00 degrees, 00 minutes, 13.6 seconds East of the Great Pyramid apex. (That's 31 degrees, 0 8 minutes, 14.40 seconds in our modern coordinates.) Grid points are keys, he says. Once you locate the keys, then you can talk about time, dimensions, and sciences we haven't even thought about.

HINTS OF AN UNTOLD SCIENCE OF SOUND

Munck has slowly become convinced that many aspects of this coded message refer to sound. Musician and composer James Furia wrote to Munck with his suggestion to correlate the Code to a keyboard of musical notes that is adjusted only slightly to get the gematrian numbers 144, 288, 432, 3168, as the number of cycles per second at which specific tones vibrate. The note A we use today vibrates at 440 cycles per second. Furia suggests the note A used by the ancients was 432 cycles per second; the octaves would then all hit these significant gematrian values. You won't hear a difference between A at 440 cycles and A at 432 cycles.

The unusual properties of sound have become a recurrent theme in my radio interviews. A few examples: sonoluminescence, a newly discovered energy source, emits harmonics of tones into liquid to create superheated bubbles and flashes of light. Soldiers break step when crossing a bridge, lest the resonance generated by footsteps falling rhythmically sets the bridge in motion. Plants react to Sonic Bloom, a program of music and specific frequencies, by growing larger, faster, and more nutrient rich. A listener sent in the account of a man witnessing a Tibetan ritual using a series of trumpets arrayed in a semi-circle around the boulder to raise a boulder onto a cliff. The Mystery of the Sphinx documentary displays the scientific principle behind levitation with experiments in sound waves creating gravity wells suspending pea-sized stones. Anomalous sounds have long been associated with the megalithic stones of the British Isles; some liken the standing stones to an application of acupuncture needles to concentrate or balance earth energies.

I find it difficult to reconcile the practice of human sacrifice with the culture whose rational, logical, sophisticated thinking produced megalithic structures of such astronomical and mathematical intrigue. On the one hand, we have hints of an ancient culture schooled in secrets of the universe, with technology that might seem like magic from our current perspective. What we view as simply temples may be multi-purpose, solid state machinery operating on principles of resonance. On the other hand, we have Spanish chroniclers eye witness accounts of human sacrifice at the Mexican temples. Researcher William Sullivan, profiled in Issue #8, says the Andean cultures practiced human sacrifice in a misguided attempt in sympathetic magic to stop the heavens, and time. It was a tragic and literal interpretation of a very old tradition. Perhaps these weren't the same culture.

Vast spans of time seems to separates them. The Native American tribes whose land encompasses Anasazi structures or Cahokian earthen mounds claim those structures were there before they were. The ancient Egyptians claimed they were the descendants of two earlier higher civilizations. A 6,000-year-old lava flow covers a section of Mexico's conical Cuicuilco Pyramid. The Sphinx has been geologically redated to at least 7,000 years old. So possibly the Mexican pyramids were designed and constructed thousands of years earlier than the dates assigned by carbon dating (the oldest dates are routinely thrown out) and pot shards that can be explained by the continual use of some sites up to the Spanish Invasion. Archeologists seem never to dig to the deeply buried levels necessary to get carbon dates that are far older than the current paradigm allows, says Sullivan. The question of how old this civilization is, is up for grabs.

Implications of Carl Munck's Code, it was part of an ancient world's science that included accurate global maps with longitude and latitude, base 10, familiar weights and measures, a 360-degree circle, and advanced architecture and construction techniques, that spanned Europe, Africa, and the Americas, is consistent with the picture emerging of a common, global mother culture, so ancient as to be forgotten, and highly advanced before it degenerated into the Dark Ages.

The lesson is that technological prowess need not necessarily go hand in hand with spiritual wisdom. Modern civilization is proof enough of that. Trend analyst Gerry Celente calls this The Age of Revelation of Hidden Knowledge, noting we find ourselves so spiritually bereft today that we naturally look to a past that cultivated high wisdom. Someday we, as most ancient cultures did, may consciously remember and model ourselves upon a long-ago Golden Age. Decoding it is a step. In the age-old struggle between light and dark; in the cycling from Golden Age to Dark Age back to Golden Age, time is on our side.

Laura Lee is the nationally syndicated host of The Laura Lee Show. Carl Munck is the author of The Code, both in book and video format. William Sullivan is the author of The Secret of the Incas: Myth, Astronomy and the War Against Time.