This is an old thread, so the person who asked the question hasn’t been around lately.
Nonetheless, it's an interesting question which I have also asked and given some thought.
These beliefs, that ancient “wisdom” involves something modern man does not or cannot understand, is generally only held in some sort of “mythical thinking”. For instance, I remember seeing this suggested many years ago on a documentary about “Coral Castle”. It’s a piece of land that a single person built a bunch of strange stuff on. They used terms like “perfectly balanced” to describe some of the stone mechanisms. One such mechanism is a stone wall where the central, large stone slab can be pushed with a single finger, causing it to rotate around an axis. Most of the wall “spins” (those studying it have since learned that wasn’t caused by some mysterious “balance”, he used bearings).
Since the place was shrouded in mystery, stories were born, of course. He supposedly only had simplistic tools, like a tripod hoist he made himself out of wood, capable of safely supporting, maybe, up to a ton, and that’s questionable. Yet many of the pieces he used weight several times that. In one story, a man brought him a stone slab on a flatbed, seeing only this makeshift tripod for tools. He was asked to turn his back. Within a few seconds he heard a scraping noise and turned around to find that the man had unloaded a 5 or 10 ton stone slab by himself in seconds. So the documentary was asking what “ancient wisdom” he might have had allowing him to perform such feats.
And then there’s the building of the pyramids, something “impossible with modern technology” (but really not). Since we couldn’t do it with the tools we have today (again, yes we could), then how did they do it? The guesses usually involve magic or aliens, the “ancient knowledge” of which has been lost.
Pretty much all of these “ancient knowledge” claims I have heard, certainly all I can think of now, involve a deep sense of mysticism of one sort or another. They’re usually talking about aliens or magic (including religious-based magic or magical happenings), but sometimes that is more implied than outright stated, sometimes being presented as a general sense of wonder with the listener left to their own imaginations.
So, essentially, it’s an undisprovable way for people to believe in magic, allowing them to believe it without giving any possible dissenters a chance to shatter those beliefs with facts. It’s a “safe magic” to believe in because, “You don’t know! You can’t know!”
@ensnaturae
I love that picture you used.