Alignments of cities in Europe

The German evangelic pastor Wilhelm Tendt, contemporaneous of Alfred Watkins (antiquity researcher who in 1920 made public his theories about a system of lines that one time marked all the surface of England, forming a capillary net built like an immense geometric web), in his opera of 1929, Germanische Heiligtümer, wrote about the links between the ancient sacred places, that he called heilige Linien (sacred lines). And the heilige Linien are nearly identical to the system of English lines. Like Watkins, also the German researcher suddenly found a following and many people, studying the topographical maps, discovered many other lines.

Supported by Heinrich Himmler, this theory was officially accepted for a lot of time. The French philosopher Xavier Guichard in his opera entitled Eleusis-Alesia discovered that in the ancient European toponymy there were three fundamental names: Burgus, Antium and Alesia; the last of these names was indeed a unique case because it belonged only to the city of east France took by Caesar in the I century a.D.

Its Greek form, Eleusi, always according to the author, went back to legendary times preceding Humerus, besides the Indo-European root Ales, Alis or Alles would mean `point of contact among the people'. In reality the root is limited to the Greek background, and it is  elJ-, eluJ-, eleuJ-,  from where, with the suffix -siV, 'EleuJsiV, from which Eleusis with the fall of the J, so there isn't probably any logical relation between Eleusi and Alesia. Guichard began to look for the terms in the toponymy that could refer to that radical, and he found that, albeit they are mainly diffuse in France, there was an Eleusi also in Egypt near the Nile delta: an ancient Greek colony. Guichard continued to carry out researches on the true meaning of the term and on the origins of the people that used it for the first time, dedicating to it twenty-five years of his life. If one grabbed as the center an ancient place called Alaise, near to Besançon in southern France (map 1), the complete Europe was divided into two 'compass-cards' (similar to those used by the Greek geographers), the first made of twenty-four lines, that divided the horizon in even segments; the second, made of four lines, which pointed to the equinoctial line and to the summer and winter solstices.

When the complemental map was compiled (maps 2 and 3) the cartographers found that some cities whose name derived from the term 'Alesia' (we notice that they included Vercelli  and not Alessandria that presents a more complete assonance) that Guichard used as a proof  were located in places a little far from the points that he showed carefully in the maps of his book.

We must recognize that there are evident similarities among his theories and those of Alfred Watkins. Without the one knowing the opera of the other, they came both to the conclusion that the trading of the salt alV had to be of vital importance in the ancient commercial routes and that there were (and this is confirmed by the official archeology) the 'streets of the salt' that allowed the provisioning of the precious food. Basically both accepted the theory that the ancient settlements of the primitive man weren't chosed randomly, but they were inserted in a complex geometric figure. Nor the one neither the other researcher could give precise answers on how and why such a vast structural plane was conceived. Anyway they put to light one of the apprehensions that probably were more present inside the spirit of the first inhabitants of Europe, that is the search of what, at least metaphorically, is beyond the horizon. Proofs were collected in Europe, in Egypt and in South America, and, as Tohn Micheil said, « all this couldn't have as the only motivation the need of calculate the time or the date, or an abstract desire to collect astronomic informations ».

And then what was the motivation? Any supposition must take into account the gigantic scale of these plannings, that surely had a practical finality. The mathematicals antecedent to Pitagora left only few, vague signs of their knowledge, but from that few we can deduce that in some manner between the harmony of the numbers, the movement of the celestial bodies and the fundamental moments of the annual cycle of rotation of the Earth, the ancients found some points of correspondence, from which an energy emanated, that today we feel only indiscriminately; their science was founded on the instinct, but not for this it was less important than our one for the development of the mankind.

Passage (adapted) taken from "Atlas of Mysteries" by Francis Hitching