Crop circles, pyramids, the Ark and the Bible

There is a phenomenon going on on earth that only very few people recognize, and that by itself it highly remarkable. 

Most of us have heard of crop circles, which are intricate works of art that are formed in grain fields, usually by bending areas of grain into patterns, and usually anonymous.



Enthusiasts ascribe these wonderful formations to the handiwork of extraterrestrials, and some go as far as to forward elaborate schemes involving mother-ships, distant galaxies and interstellar councils, or else the moaning and groaning of mother earth, glowing ley lines and vibrating energies that combined produce instances of higher math (with which the observer has to resonate in order ascend into the fifth dimension, and so on).

Take me to your dealer

Mainstream commentators, however, are sure that all of them are man-made. Some feel confident that all these formations can be reproduced by regular humans with regular human skills, while others derive their confidence from reduction and elimination, being equally sure that any movement towards the alternative would constitute the narrow end of the wedge that will separate humanity from its most practical beliefs, which in turn would lead to collective psychosis, anarchy and ultimately collapse and annihilation.

Some farmers are eager to know the perpetrators so that they can sue them for the damage, while others note with hardly suppressed glee that the affected grain was not at all destroyed but remained alive and in a far better condition than the grain that wasn't touched (longer stems, fuller heads; all that).

More to the point, however

But crop circles is not the phenomenon I want to talk about. Imagine that it was you who one day woke up with the idea of placing the whopping double triskelion in a field near Milk Hill in England.

This perfectly executed Catherine Wheel consists of 409 circles of varying sizes, laid out in a pattern that is 240 meters across (yes, that's people in the central circle below).

The whopping Milk Hill Catherine Wheel

How do you get from waking up that one morning to sitting atop Milk Hill at sunrise on 14 August 2001, undiscovered and gloating over you creation?

You would first have to be rather fanatic, that goes without saying. Then you would have to have considerable mathematical skills in addition to knowing that the Celts had a thing for triskelions, and then, for some reason, come up with the desire to make it even more difficult for everybody and create a double one.

You would have to engineer a way to print your design onto the grain, and that would take a trick or two. The greater form would have to be created at once because stamping out the circles consecutively would certainly result in misalignment. The smaller ones might be added later, but still, not a single error is permitted. I've been an engineer for three decades, and I would have to think very long and very hard for a way to pull this off. It takes a rare set of highly developed skills, and I humbly submit that I can't even think of a way to replicate this, let alone come up with it in the first place.

The colossal Oregon Sri Yantra geoglyph and the Nazca Monkey are anonymous. So is the portrait of John Williams that appeared in August 2014, just off the Old Town side of the Branko Bridge in Belgrade, Serbia.

You would probably realize right soon that you would not be able to design the whole process by yourself, let alone execute it. So you would have to recruit others, and that would take yet another trick or two.

Covert operations are nothing new in our world, but to set one up out of the blue without the benefit of an existing organization (such as the military or some secret club that is really secret) or without a formidable incentive (believable threats or lots of money) is nearly undoable. Trying to get your band together would inevitably lead to someone spilling the beans either before or after the operation.

And there's the rub, there is the phenomenon I wanted to talk about. If you were the one who designed the Milk Hill Catherine Wheel, produced it overnight AND kept everything secret, even after all the media coverage, please contact the Abarim Publications Recruitment Center because we would like to hire you.

Mum's the word

Certain companies actually have realized the commercial appeal of crop formations and their monetary injection has produced certain formations that are obviously not extraterrestrial in origin, but why are there groups of people (or aliens) who go to great lengths to anonymously produce great work of art, which won't last beyond the day of the harvest? Or, to expand the scope of the question: what explains the phenomenon of anonymous art in which the anonymity of the artist(s) is part of the final work?

Artists sign their work to be recognized and to be reckoned (and paid) for the entire body of their work. And in case the artist is working on a medium that isn't his or hers (say, graffiti artists who spray paint trains or buildings), they will often sign their work anyway with a signature that is recognizable by the scene but not by the cops. If an artist knows he's doing a one time thing, he might use anonymity as a means to publicity.

Georgia Guide Stones -- anonymous

Take the Georgia Guide Stones for instance, which, had they been commissioned by Ed Koch and erected on Time Square, would have been surely recognized for the pseudo-portentous crap they are. But now that the makers and funders are incisively anonymous, the media was and still is all over them and a disproportional percentage of people have heard of them. 

But most of the crop circles are made by people who don't claim them as their productions, and history has shown that their mere appearance serve the sole purpose of fueling the greater discussion on who were are, where we're going and whether we are alone in the universe.

Sure, some of us find that whole discussion a waste of time, but would those people engineer elaborate pranks just to watch hapless others go alien-crazy over that? There's no good reason to exclude this from the whole pallet of reasons of why people make crop circles, but I'd like to propose that the creating of crop circles ties not into humanity's inherent desire to deceive, but rather in our inherent desire to make wise.

Whichever ancient wisdom tradition we look at, they all consist of several separate exercises or disciplines. Most traditions value scientific examinations of the observable world and subsequent data retention and transmission, but most also value prayer or meditation and periods of rest. The Semitic wisdom traditions additionally utilized a technique that probably also had an entertainment value, namely the posing of riddles, and a Hebrew riddle was not a silly question the audience had to guess the answer of but a problem of which the answer had to be worked out by means of logic and reason (Judges 14, 1 Kings 10:1). The Hebrew word for riddle is hida, which is possibly related to the verb hadad, which means to be sharp, keen or swift. 

The various religions of our earth have managed to whittle the ancient wisdom traditions down to a skeleton, like a rock band that slipped further and further away from its original purpose and kept losing its founding members to the wish to go solo. Science has always been a major part of theology, but when religion began to dictate what's true or not, science broke away and pursued its whopping solo-career. Mystery, on the other hand, broke away from religion but never made it much further than silly game shows and TV quizzes. Some writers speak of a "God-shaped hole" in people who don't believe, but I'm sure it's not that simple. I'm guessing that mankind has a natural need for mystery; to be in awe of the unimaginable or to be flabbergasted by the inexplicable.

I bet that religion's failure to provide mankind with proper mystery is the reason that groups of people go out into fields and painstakingly create phenomenally mysterious images without damaging a farmer's crop.

The ear-deafening silence

Everybody knows that the Ark of the Covenant has gone missing some time after king Solomon placed it in the Temple, and over the years a generous plethora of theories have been proposed to explain its disappearance. But what theorists rarely recognize is the distinctive silence of the Hebrew scriptures concerning the fate of the Ark. This silence is so loud even, that observant readers of the Bible recognize it as an actual character of the story.

In other words: the very fact that no Hebrew author (save for perhaps the author of 2 Maccabees) spends a single word discussing the fate of the Ark, which was the reason why the Temple was built and the very item that kept Israel together, very strongly suggests that the disappearance of the Ark was part of its proper function. Nothing unexpected happened to the Ark, and it's not "lost" at all. 

And what about the great pyramids of Giza? Their origin and ultimate purpose is much debated, but why does no ancient Egyptian text talk about the actual building of them or purpose they might have? The Egyptians were great masons, but why is there not a single carving anywhere on these mysterious monuments that would make them a little less mysterious? The only answer, again, is that their mystery is part of their function. Whatever they might have been for in the ancient past, their function now is that we ponder them and subsequently doubt whatever theory is presently peddled as truth. It's almost as if these monuments are monuments to the gift of doubt, because doubt leads to renewal and renewal leads to truth. 

In recent years, a slowly growing body of scholars is advocating the idea that the Bible isn't what we always thought it was. It doesn't work they way we figured, nor does it tell the story we shoehorned into it. The familiar titles of the Books of the Bible aren't part of them and were mostly added later, and only recently have scholars mustered up the courage to admit that we have no idea who wrote the Bible, or even when or where. This leads to the unavoidable conclusion that the Bible came to pass via a hugely complex process that probably involved hundreds (thousands?) of poets, scientists, scribes, compilers, editors, redactors and proof readers. This is highly remarkable by itself, but what is even more so is that this process is nowhere referred to in the Bible, and its complexity has only in recent times been recognized.

So who wrote the Bible, built the pyramids, hid the Ark and created the crop circles? Well, here at Abarim Publications we believe that humans did all of it, but we also believe that these humans were either specifically or else generally inspired by greater forces than the usual selfish claim to fame.

And whether these greater forces are mother-ships, fifth dimensions or the angels of the Most High God, well as the prophet formerly known as Isaiah says: "Come now, and let us reason together" (Isaiah 1:18).

Come now, and let us reason together" -- Isaiah 1:18