Uriel’s Machine is the most iconoclastic book, perhaps, I’ve ever read. It’s sort of like The DaVinci Code (Yes, I read it. I admit it. You’ll probably claim you didn’t see the movie, either.)  except with less plot and a lot more math. Knight and Lomas have been exploring ancient history and pre-history for some time. Two previous works, The Hiram Key and Second Messiah: Templars, the Turin Shroud, and the Great Secret of Freemasonry, neither which I have, read covered similar material. Here’s a short list of our hidden past they claim to have discovered:

1. The great flood was caused by earth’s simultaneous collision with 7 comets and occurred in 7640 B.C. Among other things, it wiped out many species of great mammals in one fell swoop.
2. Another cataclysmic comet struck the mediterranean around 3150 B.C. but with less enormous consequences.
3. The alphabet was invented not by Middle Easterners, but by Northern Europeans, who trucked it thither. These Northern Europeans may have been the original Sumerians of the city of Ur.
4. There was a race of giants who wandered from northern europe through the middle east and into China. Having developed astronomical techniques by which they detected an incoming comet, the brought receptive listeners from the middle east to places like Scotland and Ireland (these places not being islands yet since the 3150 comet hadn’t struck), to warn them about the impending collision.
5. Jesus not only had a brother (James), but his brother was really the first head of the early church (in Jerusalem) until control was wrested away by Paul and his Roman followers.

That’s just for starters. A lot of what the authors say sounds convincing. They draw from the Dead Sea Scrolls, from Archeological Records, from disparate scholars who don’t normally communicate with one another such as paleontologists and astronomers. They point to such phenomenae as the “Megalithic Yard,” a unit of measurement quite close to our three foot yard, which unit seems to have been used to construct everything from Stonehenge to the Egyptian Pyramids. Where did everyone get it?  Why did they use it? The authors have a solid belief in their answers.

They hypothesize that one of the early warners about the 3150 comet was the writer of The Book of Enoch, a biblical-era document from the Dead Sea Scrolls. He recounts being taken to certain observatories which Lomas and Knight calculate could only have been located in Scotland and Ireland so that he could deliver the astronomical goods back to his people and save them. These observatories were aligned not only to the equinoxes and the solstices, but to the cycles of Venus. The authors assert that all of this was needed to help predict the stars, control agriculture, arrange for women to be fertilized at the spring equinox so that babies could be born at the winter solstice so that there could be an orderly transmigration of souls to continue the priestly line.

Now, I’m reading all this, going along, skeptical, but entertained and still wondering how much could be true. They qualify a lot of what they say, but there’s a good deal of supposing that things could have happened in no other way than they describe. Or that at least they couldn’t possibly have happened as establishment archeologists/historians describe. I’m in no position to evaluate most of what I’m reading because I’m no student of archeology or astronomy or (much less) math. So I decided to see how the authors came out relative to stuff in which I do have some expertise. Starting with writing.

However good Lomas and Knight are with figures, they’re either lousy proofreaders or their copyreader failed them miserably. There are many sentences with missing words, Many words with gaps between letters. Furthermore, their attempts at etymology stretch the limits. For example, the title of the book comes from the name of an angel named Uriel who takes the aforementioned Enoch to the astronomical warning sites. In speculating about the source of this angel’s name, the authors say this:

…The Egyptian recorded that this. . .had come from a place called “Ta-Ur”. . ….The word “Ta” …meant ”land” in ancient Egyptian. However, the word “Ur” is widely thought to mean “city”. So that the implication is that “Ta-Ur” was an ancient place where there is…a land of integrated communities…

   This meaning of the word “Ur” caused us to reflect on the meaning of the name “Uriel”. Because an “El” ending of a Hebrew word meant “of God” , it seems reasonable to take this angel,s name as giving the meaning “city of God”.

     Now I’ll tell you one on myself. There is, as most everyone knows, an Aegean Island called Rhodes. There is also a country in Africa formerly called Rhodesia. I knew that Cecil Rhodes was an English explorer/conquerer/diamond mogul and thought it “reasonable to take this Island’s name” as bequeathed by that nineteenth century Britisher. I recently visited said island and found to my ignorant embarrassment that the word “rhodes” means “rose” in Greek and has no connection to anything British whatsoever.

That’s not to say that Lomas and Knight aren’t right. It’s to say that their evidence is too slim to credit in this case without further substantiation and thus casts doubt on other conclusions. Another case in point, an assertion they make about America. Check these facts:

1. George Washington and Benjamin Franklin were Freemasons. So were many of the founding fathers. Much of Lomas and Knight’s “evidence” for their theses depends on analysis and application of the text of the rites of Freemasonry.
2. On the day preceding the spring equinox in 1990, George (H.W.) Bush…(A senior Freemason), signed into law the historic Joint Resolution of both Houses of Congress recognizing the seven Noachide laws as “the bedrock of society from the dawn of civilization” and urged his country to “return the world to the moral and ethical values contained in those laws..” [I guess this happened. Congress does some weird stuff. I’m not going to take the trouble, though, to check.]

3. David Ovason, a researcher in arcane subjects…found no less than 20 zodiacs on public display in the center of [Washington D.C.]

      From these facts, the authors conclude that “the Noachite Degree [part of the Freemason Ritual] continues to be “[very] important in American Law.” Which is probably news to anyone in the American legal profession and certainly news to the general citizenry.

     Now, I might conclude from the fact that Bush the elder is a Mason and that many of the neo-conservatives who worked in his administration are also probably Freemasons and that thus the Iraq war is a conspiracy of Freemasons based on Noachite law.

   I’m not sorry I read Uriel’s Machine. I learned quite a bit about astronomy, a lot about the book of Enoch, and got some insights into the Knights Templar and Freemasonry. Certainly, there are certainly huge holes in our knowledge of our own prehistory, let alone our planets. Assumptions need challenging and in many cases the evidence is so slim that one guess seems as good as another. However, to infer an “accurate” story of humankind largely from the rites of Freemasonry, asserting that these rites contain our racial memory of events from 10,000 years ago seems to me inductive reasoning at its most dubious, and in some cases ridiculous. It’s a great instance of what can be accomplished by those who go out looking for proof of conclusions they’re already formed. Scientific method, anyone?