The Dragon's Mirror: The Magic of Angkor Wat IV
Part 4
Diego Antolini
31/05/2022 08:17:17
William Van de Bogart wrote a series of diaries on his travels to Angkor Wat, later published as Stones in the Sky. Like many other researchers, he too noted the Cosmic energy that radiates from the sacred place of Angkor. He writes,
"... the predominant thought is to return to a place where the intention of paying homage to the Cosmos was a priority in the minds of the Khmer kings ..."
In 2003, ten years before our visit to the temples, Angkor was targeted in a series of political attacks when a mob of furious Cambodians roamed the streets of Phnom Penh and destroyed the Thai Embassy, Thai hotels and shops. This unrest was allegedly caused by actress Suvanan Kongying who declared that Cambodia has stolen Angkor Wat from Thailand. Others, however, believe that behind this event there may be the hand of Hun Sen, the authoritarian prime minister of Cambodia, who could have used the crowd for his political advantages prior to the July elections of that year. In fact this hypothesis seems the most probable, for such a strategy has been widely used by the Hun Sen regime both in the past and in the following years.
What struck Van de Bogart more than anything else, beyond the archaeological discoveries and Hancock's theory of the astronomical alignment of the temples was the realization that the Khmer civilization had its own place in the cosmos, and had built Angkor Wat to celebrate celestial dynamics such as equinoxes, solstices, eclipses, planetary passages, etc.