THE ENIGMA OF THE TOWERS

Kindred Spirit Autumn 1997

IRELAND'S COUNTRYSIDE IS DOTTED WITH SCORES OF ROUND TOWERS BUILT BY MONKS IN THE SIXTH AND SEVENTH CENTURIES. FOR MORE THAN 40 YEARS A TOP US SCIENTIST, PROFESSOR PHILIP CALLAHAN, HAS PONDERED THEIR MYSTERY. HIS DISCOVERY, ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT THIS CENTURY, HAS HUGE IMPLICATIONS FOR MODERN MAN. FOR THESE TOWERS, HE SAYS, ARE NOTHING LESS THAN RADIO ANTENNAE.   BRIAN FREESTON, A DOCUMENTARY FILM MAKER, TELLS THE STORY.

Radio waves affect human behaviour
Round tower energy
Discovering the star map
Natural radio receivers
Natural energy for health and soil fertility
Mirrors in the landscape
Stone circles, steeples, pyramids - are they all antennae?
Scientific proof for levitation?

Belleek is a small town in County Fermanagh, known for its fine porcelain. During the Second World War it was also an ideal position for a top secret radio range station. As a 20-year-old GI, Phil Callahan was responsible for keeping the radio range operational. This station,  the first of its kind, enabled RAF Coastal Command to maintain 24-hour cover over the Western Approaches.

'I'm very pleased with what I did there. Callahan says. Keeping aircraft over the Atlantic all the time meant that the U-boats had to remain submerged. The convoys got through and both English and German lives were saved.'

Callahan' s ability to view life from a different perspective imbues his work with a freshness and vitality that is so important to any major scientific breakthrough. His contribution to science has been massive, yet. as most of his work has been in the less than glamorous field of agriculture, it has largely gone unnoticed by the general public. Callahan's expertise covers entomology, ornithology and VLF/ELF radio waves; he is a leading light in non-invasive methods of insect control. It is this broad knowledge that allows a cross-fertilisation of ideas to occur, reminiscent of the way natural philosophers like Faraday, Newton and Tyndall worked.

Indeed much of Callahan's pre-eminent work in the infrared spectrum and with paramagnetism is a continuation of the discoveries made by the Englishman Michael Faraday and his Irish friend John Tyndall.

Radio waves affect human behaviour

Callahan discovered that radio signals in the far infrared spectrum are a crucial element in insect behaviour. He also knew that radio signals could affect human behaviour and well-being.

During a particularly severe winter storm in Ireland in 1944 the young GI was on night duty alone at the station when both the primary and back-up transmitters failed. With ten aircraft out over the Atlantic dependent on his signal to get back, it was a fraught moment.

'I couldn't make any sense of it. Both machines were working fine, but there was no signal transmitting. Callahan shakes his head at the memory. 'But then I remembered what an old Arctic radio man once told me about how ice-coated insulators could earth the signal. So I climbed up the antennae poles and whacked the ice off with a broom stick. It did the trick. But by the time I'd finished I could hardly stand up; the radio energy had made me drunk."

Round tower energy

As a climber Callahan was familiar with climber's high' -a feeling of calmness and peace combined with a high level of mental and bodily energy sustainable over long periods of time. He had become convinced that the feeling of elation he had when climbing was more to do with the power of the rock than anything else. When he visited his first round tower at Devenish on Loch Erne he experienced a similar feeling to climber's high.

I've always been drawn to mystical places - spots on Earth that induce a feeling of awe or wonder, a feeling of oneness, where there is no real sense of time. Ireland has many of these places. The round tower at Devenish is one.'

It was the feeling from Devenish, along with the incident at the radio station, that created the impetus for Callahan's round tower research.

The Irish round towers were constructed by monks towards the end of the great period of monastic expansion, between the fifth and the seventh centuries. When they were built they would have been the only stone structures in the monastery. Today 25 or more towers stand upright in perfect form, and the remains, or stubs, of another 43 dot the countryside.

I remember asking what special power was hidden in these towers; and could we ever understand this power?'

Discovering the star map
Some years before, Callahan had bought Professor Barrow's Irish Heritage pamphlet on round towers which included a fine map of the still-standing towers.

'I was lying on a couch looking at the map. There was something very familiar about it - apart from it being a map of Ireland! After about five or ten minutes it suddenly flashed into my mind - insight I believe it is called - exactly why the map appeared so familiar. The towers formed a star map of the northern night sky. I have used that sky map dozens and dozens of times hiking around in the deserts of the world. It is gouged like a carved woodblock into my brain.'

One of the best preserved monasteries is Clonmacnoise in the centre of the great plain of Ireland. It is on the Shannon River and is widely assumed to have been the centre for the entire monastic movement. Callahan surmised that it was placed to represent the north star Polaris. All the other star groups then fell into place -Ursa Major, Draco, Cassiopeia, Camelopardalis and Lynx, far to the south (Figures 1 & 2).

What Callahan had drawn was an almost perfect sky for the December solstice. The imperfections in the round tower star plot lie mainly in the fact that the monks had to fix their towers according to the lie of the land.

What is astonishing about the round tower star map of Ireland is that there were two great ecclesiastical centres during the early days of Christianity in Ireland: one at Armagh in the north and one at Clonmacnoise in central Ireland. In relation to the round tower plot of Draco, Armagh is exactly at the point of the ecliptic centre. This demonstrates very clearly that the Celtic peoples of Ireland knew not only that the Earth was round, but also about precession - the slow wobble of the Earth around a theoretical or ecliptic centre of the sky, a circular movement which takes 25,800 years to complete.

It is possible to speculate that the knowledge of astronomy, and especially of precession and the ecliptic centre, was carried to Ireland by the .Ancient Egyptians. The Denderah circular zodiac (300 BC). for example, proves they too had this knowledge.

'The technocrat, who is high-energy, inorganic-slanted, will of course scoff at my star map of round towers and say that the correlation is coincidental.' Callahan shrugs. For the high-energy' technocrat every phenomenon that does not hit one on the head with an inorganic hammer is a coincidence. Coincidence is the cop-out word of the century used to put low-energy organic researchers in their place.'

Natural radio receivers
Could there have been any other purpose than this star map to the construction of round towers? Above all the Celts were a practical people, and to undertake this huge effort just to demonstrate an esoteric knowledge seems unthinkable.

The tower on Devenish island, similar to many others, is a finely jointed structure of sandstone. It is 25 metres high and has a base circumference of 15.14 metres. In the fifth (and top) floor are four square-headed windows facing east-northeast, south-southeast, west-southwest and north-northwest. The lower four floors each have either one or two windows facing in various directions. The doorway is approximately three metres above the ground.

Callahan found that all the round towers were made of paramagnetic stone: that is stone that resonates positively in a magnetic field. He also noticed that all these towers were to be found in diamagnetic areas - areas of much weaker, and opposite, negative, susceptibility.

It was Michael Faraday and John Tyndail who discovered these very subtle forces of para-magnetism and diamagnetism.

Strangely enough, although physicists have spent years measuring these energies, and utilising them to explain theoretical atomic forces, nowhere in the scientific literature has anyone - chemist, physicist, or biologist - asked what these two opposite forces mean to life. Like Mark Twain once said, "everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it. "

In 1956 Callahan discovered that moths were not attracted to visible light, but rather to the infrared emission from scent molecules that became 'peaks' or resonant radiation when they hit the moth's vibrating antenna. Moths navigate by molecular radio laser or maser technology.

It was the antenna with all its hundreds of strange-shaped spines (called sensilla) that was doing the work by feeling the radiation. So, for example, the reason why moths spiral rather than fly direct into a light source is that different parts of their sensilla pick up slightly different wavelengths of the emission, depending on how closely they approach the source (Figure 3).

Callahan s breakthrough came quite suddenly and totally unexpectedly.

'I was just admiring how clever the builders were to make a tower that had a very slight taper of three degrees. Then it dawned on me how similar these towers looked to certain insect antennae. It was a complete revelation.'

Obviously round towers are not conventional antennae. They are in fact built of limestone, mica schist or sandstone blocks and are therefore closer to silicon semi-conductors than to metallic conductors. As the towers have dielectric (insulative) properties, the}' act as DC rectifiers and are able to detect and store incoming cosmic electromagnetic/magnetic energy.

(Fig. 4) Two carborundum round towers. The tower on the left is modelled after Devenish tower and the one on the right after Turlough round tower. Note the very fine field lines of concentrated salts around both towers. On the Turlough tower the salts concentrated heavily at the levels where floors and windows are located.

The physics of dielectric systems is extremely complex. However, they can be formed into tubular or rectangular waveguides to collect and direct energy in the same manner as a metallic radio or TV antenna. The size of antennae determine the length of radio waves with which they are able to resonate. Since round towers are of the order of metres in length they must be, according to Callahan, collectors of cosmic radio waves of a few metres magnitude.

Using a scale model of a round tower, made from paramagnetic carborundum paper and placed in a high frequency-oscillator called a Klystron, Callahan showed that the model actually increased (amplified) the radio energy from 6dB to 9dB. In another experiment it also detected differences in radiation at night and from the sun.

One of the most controversial questions concerning these towers is the usual high placement of the doors, with varying amounts of infill inside up to door level. Historians who have attempted an explanation have cited the need for defence. But round towers are indefensible, and not large enough to withstand a protracted siege. If the towers are viewed as antennae, then the infill can be seen as a way the monks could fine-tune the tower to assure sharp resonance.

That the monks could detect this energy seems, from the perspective of a high-tech society, incredible. But all they were doing was tuning in to nature; using their bodies as antennae, feeling the energy. In a further experiment a model of the Turlough round tower was soaked in a diamagnetic solution of Epsom salts and then allowed to dry naturally. Thin force lines spaced evenly at one millimetre appeared up the tower. On the conical roof at the top the force line spiralled up to the point. At certain heights up the tower the force lines became much thicker bands. These correlate precisely with the floor levels in the actual tower (Figure 4).

Natural energy for health and soil fertility

So where is the energy coming from and how do we utilise it?

Energy has been detected from three sources: the night sky, the sun, and lightning.

The night sky
The towers are aligned with the stars of the night sky at the winter solstice and we know that     cosmic     microwave radiation    at    14.6    metre wavelengths is emitted from that region of the universe.

The sun
The towers also pick up particles of energy which are separated by sun-flare activity into north and south magnetic poles. At this temperature magnetic poles are torn apart and then stay apart until they become adsorbed (molecules stick to the surface). South 'monopoles' (S) are adsorbed by paramagnetic stone and soil and north monopoles (N) by plants, just like a battery. Oxygen also stores south monopoles; it is the most para­magnetic of gases. Most organic or diamagnetic substances store north monopoles {Figure 5).

Over the aeons the charge trickles out. The south monopoles in the soil meet the north monopoles of seeds or roots, and with the catalyst of nitrogen and water set growth and photosynthesis on their way. It is the fundamental force behind nature.

Round towers, then, act as stone antennae to collect many more south magneto-electric monopoles than the surrounding soil. They release these mono-poles, so stimulating better growth in crops around their base.

A small model round tower placed in the centre of a non-paramagnetic plastic flower pot, with seedling radishes planted around the base of the tower, will stimulate the seedlings to grow many more fine rootlets than a pot with the same soil but no central round tower. Already a farmer in the north of England is using round tower technology and getting significant increases in crop yield.

Lightning
The third source of energy is from lightning. There are over 4,000 strikes a minute around the world and these set up a very high-frequency standing wave of 60,000 Hertz (cycles/ sec) in the atmosphere. Callahan has shown that the towers reduce this frequency to various slower frequencies which -we can use. The amplification factor or strength of signal is between 150 to 200 times the energy outside. The lowest he has discovered is around 8Hz a minute. Recent American medical research has found this frequency in human bodies and has termed it the primary respiratory function. It is vital to our existence.

There are ELF radio frequencies in the 4-14 Hz range, or brain-wave region. During meditation our brains emit waves around 8Hz/sec, so these towers would enhance the ability of monks to meditate. These frequencies also have an anti-infection property.

Frequencies are also found around 2.000Hz - the electric-anaesthesia region - and around 250KHz, the region for electronic heat induction. In the 19th Century some dentists in America were using machines to generate 2,000Hz for dental extraction. Research in Poland in 1986 showed that these types of radiation enhance the auto­immune system and reduce pain. In other words, the towers aid healing, and could have been places where -women -would go to reduce their birth pains.

According to the Head of the International Institute for Biophysics, Professor Fritz-AlbertPopp, ProfessorCallahan's discovery concerning the Irish round towers is one ox the most important discoveries of the century. The low-energy implications for our health, well-being and nutrition are far reaching.'

Mirrors in the landscape
There is more to come. In antenna technology form follows function, so different shapes will resonate to different frequencies. Obtain an accurate geological survey map of a favourite area, and with a hard steel stylus trace and cut the contours into a sheet of carborundum paper. Immerse the sheet in a saturated solution of Epsom salts for 24 hours. Then allow to dry naturally. In a few days an energy map of growing force lines appears. The lines of force will concentrate in the most energetic spots on the carborundum map. Even more strangely, if the map is put aside and observed for six months or a year, the crystals of diamagnetic Epsom salts -will begin to grow and produce little hills and mountains. It is an accurate template of the real landscape.

'Since the crystals will reproduce and grow, who is to say that the forces of rock and soil are not living!' Callahan gestures to the map. The beauty of these experiments is that anyone can show how these weak forces can grow and accumulate energy.

'You can even detect differences in behaviour in various populations, dependent on the paramagnetic nature of the sub-rock. Take Belfast for instance. The sub-rock under that city is basalt, which is highly paramagnetic, and the sub-rock under Dublin is diamagnetic limestone. We know that Dubliners are more laid-back. It's the same difference with the population of North and South Vietnam and, say, between New York and Florida.'

Stone circles, steeples, pyramids - are they all antennae?

Callahan's findings concerning the Irish round towers uncover a major reason for the construction of stone circles, church steeples, pagodas, chedi, minarets and pyramids. They are all antennae - tapping into natural radic energy for healing, meditation and so on.

But whatever man has created as an antenna, nature was there first (Figures 6 to 11).

The Egyptians had two hieroglyphics for stone - both take the exact proportions of the building stones found in the Great Pyramid. One Hieroglyph is open like this:    , the other has lines across it like this:    , in the same way as Callahan's model paramagnetic round tower has force lines across it. Both symbols represent the same syllable for stone, aner. The hieroglyph for prepared stone is aner sept (two syllables) and is:

(Fig. 6) Burmese stupas. (inset fig. 7) Many diptera (flies) have stupa or pagoda-tapered sensilla on their antennae.

It contains a feather for levitation, waves, a mouth (source of diamagnetic breath), a stone (with paramagnetic force lines) and finally a pyramid (Septih, the Dog Star). The little circle is the sign for sand from which the rocks are made, the bar the sign for symmetry, and the three lines ||| for plural (many building stones).

The hieroglyph for black granite is:

Below: (fig. 12) An Egyptian priestess raising her hands above the outstretched body of a pharaoh. Opposite: (fig. 13) Another panel showing a pharaoh levitating off the couch. Similar to the panels referred to in the text.

This word is similar to prepared granite except that the pyramid sign (Septih), forthe Dog Star, is replaced by the symbol for a wing (many feathers), a much stronger levitation force than one feather . In other words black granite is a paramagnetic battery for the force. Every Egyptian word for different types of para-magnetic stone, eg. aner-en-rut (sandstone),

(Fig. 11) The antenna sensilla of a wasp showing pyramidal sensilia and corrugated sensilla - two of the best configurations for focusing and concentrating the paramagnetic force. The species, Polistes metricus, is a vespid wasp. Although seldom mentioned in the popular literature, the vespid hieroglyph is even more common in Egyptian lore than the sacred scarab beetle.
aner-en-hatch  (white limestone), aner-en-bekbenu (porphyry), aner-en-moat (stone of truth) etc., has the symbol      with force field lines in it.

It is possible that the knowledge and engineering skills were passed down to the Celts from the Ancient Egptians. It was in Egypt, perhaps, that man reached a pinnacle of subtle-energy manipulation.

Scientific proof for levitation?

Callahan suggests that the outer limestone portion of the Great Pyramid at Giza serves as a giant condenser lens - as in a photographic enlarger - to diffuse and concentrate paramagnetic waves. The full pagoda construction of the King's Chamber is made from the most highly paramagnetic of all stone, pink granite. Its succession of stone floors or lenses serves to concentrate the cosmic para-magnetism (like light waves; down into the actual chamber.

Suspended model round towers are very sensitive energy detectors, responding to the paramagnetic-infrared aura of the human body. To prove his theory Callahan took one into the King's Chamber.

'Usually the model would swing through about 60 or 70 degrees to point to an approaching human. I found that in the King's Chamber the same model would move 200-300 degrees in a steady sweep to the human aura. That's telekinesis. The sensor was five to ten times as sensitive inside the Pyramid. The model also rocked violently up and down every time a human body approached it; this is, in effect. levitation.'

Callahan says that since the outer smooth tura limestone casing of the Great Pyramid has been destroyed it will never again stimulate total levitation of a heavy body. Certainly, in my opinion, one of the reasons for its construction was to induce levitation.' He refers to a beautiful series of ancient stone-wall reliefs which show an Egyptian priestess raising her hands above the outstretched body of a pharaoh. In the next panel the pharaoh is six inches off the couch (see figures 12 & 73).

'Deep in the Great Pyramid the priests breathed out that mixture we call breath - but which the Orientals call the spirit of life,' Callahan explains. 'They chanted to modulate the potent vapour which was then energy magnified by the great stone paramagnetic pyramid. Ever so gently they rose in the air. Their very own wall pictographs tell us that this is so.'                  

The author is looking for co-production finance for a film/video documentary series.

Bibliography Nature's Silent Music,  Philip Callahan. ISBN 0-911311-33-5
Paramagnetism, Philip Callahan. ISBN 0-911311-49-1 Ancient Mysteries,   Modern Visions, Philip Callahan. ISBN 0-911311-08-4

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