America Before

by Graham Hancock

  In particular, whether we speak of the visionary “leap” to the Milky Way and to the Underworld that lies beyond it made by Tukano shamans under the influence of ayahuasca, or of Mississippian ideas concerning the “Path of Souls,” or of the ancient Egyptian afterlife journey through the Duat, I think the only reasonable conclusion to be drawn from the material presented in previous chapters is that we are dealing with a complex and sophisticated system of shared ideas inherited from a remote common ancestor. And just as our DNA can be “reverse engineered” by geneticists to reveal much about our forebears, so, too, the shared segments of cultural DNA in the religions of the Mississippi Valley and ancient Egypt give us insights into the character of the vastly more ancient predecessor religion that spawned them both. That ancient religion—the religion of the lost civilization—was itself, I would contend, a highly specialized offshoot of Native American shamanism and its primary focus, as is the focus of all shamanism, was the mystery of death.

  WHAT HAPPENS TO US WHEN WE DIE?

  OUR SOCIETY PREFERS TO IGNORE and marginalize the problem of death. It is an ever-present reality for all of us—much less when we are young, much more as we grow old—and yet we do all we can to avoid it. We know in an abstract sense that it awaits us, but meanwhile we prefer to dwell as little as possible on its implications and to live our lives as though they will never end.

  The reference frame out of which such thinking emerges cannot be pinned on any of the Abrahamic religions but belongs to the scientism of the modern age, which holds that we are entirely material creatures, random accidents of chemistry and biology, that there is no transcendent meaning or purpose to our existence, that there is no such thing as the soul, that death is final, and that there is no “afterlife.” If those are your beliefs, which are only a subset of wider beliefs that strip the universe of spirit and conceive of it as some sort of gigantic, unconscious automaton, then of course it makes sense to abjure all thoughts of death and to postpone death for as long as possible, even though many ancient traditions, despised by the scientific mind-set, warn that unwillingness to die produces unfavorable results. “As here in America,” comments W. Y. Evans-Wentz, the translator of The Tibetan Book of the Dead,

  every effort is apt to be made by a materialistically inclined medical science to postpone, and thereby to interfere with, the death-process. Very often the dying is not permitted to die in his or her own home or in a normal, unperturbed mental condition when the hospital has been reached. To die in hospital, probably while under the mind-benumbing influence of some opiate, or else under the stimulation of some drug injected into the body to enable the dying to cling to life as long as possible, cannot but be productive of a very undesirable death, as undesirable as that of a shell-shocked soldier on a battlefield. Even as the normal result of the birth-process may be aborted by malpractices, so, similarly, may the normal result of the death-process be aborted.11

  Matters would have been handled very differently, I propose, in an advanced Native American civilization that had not severed its roots with shamanism—as we have done—but had instead evolved forms of science and technology that emerged directly from shamanistic preoccupations and shamanistic experiences. Rather than turning its back on death, I expect that such a civilization would have confronted and investigated every aspect of the mystery, and would certainly have deployed trance techniques with scientific objectivity and discipline to explore and test the reality status of the “Otherworlds” and “Underworlds” encountered in vision.

  It is further evidence of a remote common source behind some widespread religious motifs that one of the most famous myths of the ancient Greeks—the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice—was also present, long before European contact, in the ancient pre-Columbian cultures of North America.12 Some details vary, as of course do the names of the central characters and the general setting, but the underlying structure remains the same13—(1) a wife or sweetheart (Eurydice) dies prematurely; (2) her husband or lover (Orpheus) follows her soul to the Underworld and persuades its ruler to let her return with him to the land of the living; (3) Eurydice’s release is agreed on condition that she walk behind Orpheus as they make the return journey from the Underworld and that under no circumstances should he set eyes on her until they reach the land of the living; (4) at the last moment, overcome with love, Orpheus cannot resist glancing over his shoulder at his wife and in that instant she is cast back into the Underworld that she can henceforth never leave.

  So compellingly similar are the Native American and Greek versions that leading scholar of religions Ake Hultkrantz dedicated an immense monograph to the mystery, published in Stockholm in 1957, titled The North American Indian Orpheus Tradition.14 Meanwhile his contemporary, Canadian ethnographer Charles Marius Barbeau, proposed that the Greek and Native American stories must both be offshoots of some much older core narrative and concluded, “The worldwide diffusion from an unknown source of a tale so typically classical as Orpheus and Eurydice must have required millenniums.”15

  Of course I agree that the wide distribution of localized versions of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth suggests the great antiquity of the common source from which they all descend. But what I find equally interesting is that the foundations of the narrative clearly lie in the concepts of the afterlife journey of the soul and the duality of spirit and matter so central to the religious beliefs of ancient Egypt and the ancient Mississippi Valley. Could it be that what we have in these superficially separate but deeply interconnected systems are the surviving threads from a once immense tapestry of thought about the human condition, our place in the cosmos, and the meaning of life and death?

  And just as our own sciences today are capable of highly sophisticated interventions and manipulations in the realm of matter, might it not be that the sciences of the lost civilization were capable of equally effective interventions and manipulations in the realm of spirit—and possibly, therefore, had accumulated veridical information concerning dimensions of reality about which we ourselves are presently entirely ignorant?

  For those who believe that all notions of “spirit” are fantasy, that consciousness expires with the physical body, and that any form of life after death is therefore impossible, the notion of investing time, resources, and ingenuity in developing a “science of death”—perhaps better termed a “science of the afterlife” or even a “science of immortality”—sounds like the worst kind of wishful thinking. The consequence, described so eloquently by W. Y. Evans-Wentz, is that from the materialistic perspective the only valid application of science to the problem of death is in the outfitting of hospitals and the preparation of medicines to “ease” the passing and—if the deceased is otherwise in good physical condition—to recycle his or her organs.

  But what if our materialist science, which has a pedigree of only a few hundred years since the dawn of the so-called Age of Reason in the late seventeenth century, is fundamentally incomplete in its analysis of the nature of reality and of the phenomenon of death? And what if the far older tradition of the afterlife journey of the soul manifested in ancient Egypt and in the ancient Mississippi Valley, and by Amazonian shamans to this day, conceals deep truths?

  If that were the case, then Western scientific materialism might have led us down a very dark and dangerous path indeed—one with repercussions across eternity.

  In Tibetan Buddhism the afterlife realm is known as the Bardo—literally “the Between.” Just like the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead and the Mississippian oral and iconographic traditions, the purpose of the Tibetan Book of the Dead is to serve as a guidebook and instruction manual for the soul on its postmortem journey through this strange parallel dimension.

  “The Between,” explains prominent American Buddhist scholar Robert A. F. Thurman, is “a time of crisis after death when the soul (the very subtle mind-body) is in its most highly fluid state.”16 It is a time of extraordinary danger but also of extraordinary opportunity:

  If the g
ood person, who has a strong momentum of good evolutionary action, is unprepared for the Between, he or she can lose an enormous amount of evolutionary progress in the twinkling of an eye by becoming frightened and hiding in darkness. Similarly, a bad person, who has a great weight of negative evolution, if well prepared for the Between, can overcome immense eons of wretched lives by bravely shooting for the light. After all, a tiny achievement on the subtle plane can have a powerful impact on the gross. The soul in the Between can directly modify, just with creative imagination, what the Buddhists call “the spiritual genes” it carries with it. The Between voyager has temporarily an immensely heightened intelligence, extraordinary powers of concentration, special abilities of clairvoyance and teleportation, flexibility to become whatever can be imagined and the openness to be radically transformed by a thought or a vision or an instruction. This is indeed why the Between traveler can become instantly liberated just by understanding where he or she is in the Between, what the reality is, where the allies are, and where the dangers.17

  Western science possesses unprecedented knowledge of the material realm over which it has achieved extensive mastery. We should not assume, however, that this means it is also automatically in possession of superior knowledge that refutes the Tibetan “Science of Death” (the phrase that Robert Thurman uses to describe the teachings in The Tibetan Book of the Dead18). On the contrary, since Western science has shunned investigation of the afterlife because of the unevidenced preconception that there is no such thing, we should rather accept that Tibetan Buddhism, which has devoted long centuries of intelligent study to the matter, may be far ahead of us. Moreover, as I’ve argued, The Tibetan Book of the Dead descends from the same vastly older progenitor that also gave rise to the ancient Egyptian and Mississippian systems and therefore might potentially be harnessed, like them, to the task of reconstructing that progenitor.

  My sense is that the lost civilization, as might be expected with its proposed shamanic origins, was not much interested in material things. Like many other Native American cultures, its primary goals were not to do with the acquisition of status or wealth but instead were focused, through vision quests and right living, on the perfection of the soul. From the complexity and deep wisdom that still shines through in its offspring religions, I suggest that it took these inquiries very far into regions of mystery that in our culture even quantum physicists and scientists engaged with virtual reality have barely begun to contemplate. In order to prepare its initiates thoroughly so that they might be “well equipped” for the ultimate journey of death—surely a matter of far greater significance than any material concerns—the direct exploration of parallel dimensions would, as noted earlier, almost certainly have been undertaken. Had this investigation been allowed to proceed uninterrupted it might by now have transcended space, time, and matter entirely, but 12,800 years ago a deadly mass of matter in the form of the Younger Dryas comet was flung at it and brought a pause to the great prehistoric quest.

  A pause but not a halt—for if I’m right there were survivors who attempted, with varying degrees of success, to repromulgate the lost teachings, planting “sleeper cells” far and wide in hunter-gatherer cultures in the form of institutions and memes that could store and transmit knowledge and, when the time was right, activate a program of public works, rapid agricultural development, and enhanced spiritual inquiry.

  As to the fate of the lost civilization itself, I can only guess that its North American homeland, in which it may have evolved in comparative isolation for more than 100,000 years, was located in one or several of the immense areas south of the ice cap, from the Channeled Scablands of Washington State in the west, through Nebraska, Wyoming, and the Dakotas, through the Great Lakes where one of most devastating impacts may have occurred, and east to the Finger Lakes of upstate New York. I’ve suggested that this was a seafaring civilization, able to map the Ice Age world and spread its influence to remote shores, but if it had harbors on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of North America 13,000 years ago, they would have been submerged by the rapid rise in sea levels at the onset of the Younger Dryas 12,800 years ago and by the even more massive rise that marked the end of the Younger Dryas 11,600 years ago when the remnant ice caps of North America and Europe simultaneously collapsed into the oceans.

  PAST IMPERFECT, FUTURE UNCERTAIN

  THERE ARE LITERALLY THOUSANDS OF myths from every inhabited continent that speak of the existence of an advanced civilization in remote prehistory, of the lost golden age in which it flourished, and of the cataclysm that brought it to an end. A feature shared by many of them—the story of Atlantis, for example, or of Noah’s flood—is the notion that human beings, by their own arrogance, cruelty, and disrespect for the earth, had somehow brought the disaster down upon their own heads and accordingly were obliged by the gods to go back to basics and learn humility again.

  Where does this sense of ancestral guilt come from with its peculiar intimations of a mistaken direction taken by humanity in some remote period and purged by a global catastrophe? These are not the kinds of thoughts one would expect hunter-gatherers to devote much time to. A technologically advanced people, on the other hand, particularly if they had mastered the transmutation of matter, would have had vastly more potential for hubris and overreach. In the event of the cataclysmic downfall of their civilization, those who survived might well have reflected on their history and blamed themselves for what happened.

  Who knows? Perhaps some hubristic excesses had occurred that would have justified such speculations?

  A drift toward self-indulgent materialism?

  The introduction of human sacrifice?

  The appearance of a new and vigorously proselytizing cult denying the existence of the soul?

  The enslavement and exploitation of hunter-gatherer tribes?

  The arming of one group of hunter-gatherers—such as Clovis—to give it a competitive advantage over others?

  There could be 1,000 reasons why the humbled survivors of a once powerful but now utterly destroyed civilization seeking refuge among hunter-gatherers might have arrived with a sense of guilt.

  An Ojibwa tradition seems relevant. It speaks of a comet that “burned up the earth” in the remote past and that is destined to return:

  The star with the long, wide tail is going to destroy the world some day when it comes low again. That’s the comet called Long-Tailed Heavenly Climbing Star. It came down here once, thousands of years ago. Just like the sun. It had radiation and burning heat in its tail …

  Indian people were here before that happened, living on the earth. But things were wrong with nature on the earth, a lot of people had abandoned the spiritual path. The Holy Spirit warned them a long time before the comet came. Medicine men told everyone to prepare. … The comet burnt everything to the ground. There wasn’t a thing left …

  There is a prophecy that the comet will destroy the earth again. But it’s a restoration. The greatest blessing this island [Turtle Island] will ever have. People don’t listen to their spiritual guidance today. There will be signs in the sun, moon and stars when that comet comes down again.19

  Our science and technology in the twenty-first century are close to the point where, should we choose to do so and be willing to divert the necessary resources from—say—military expenditures, it would be within our capacity to sweep our cosmic environment clean of asteroids and cometary debris and thus spare future generations the existential threat of further impacts. What is not within our scientific and technological competence, however, is to restore the earth and its environment after a major impact has occurred. Astronomer William Napier, professor of astrobiology at the University of Cardiff and a world expert on comets and asteroids, reminds us that the consequences of a global celestial catastrophe would far outstrip our capacity to respond:

  A modest impact has the potential to end civilisation, a giant one might put our species into an irreversible decline, like other primate species past and pres
ent. It took over three billion years of evolution to produce the sole terrestrial species capable of understanding the universe, and we do not know whether, if we are removed, intelligence is likely to evolve again. Nor do we know whether there are other intelligent species in our Galaxy. In the event that we are alone, and are removed by some catastrophe, then our Galaxy will return to its former dumb state and may never again leave it. In that sense, the survival of this particular species of ape is a cosmic imperative.20

  We have already received fair warning from the universe in the form of the cataclysmic earth changes at the onset of the Younger Dryas. No serious researcher disputes that those earth changes occurred and, since 2007, the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis has established itself as the most widely accepted explanation for everything that happened. But at first the earth scientists behind the hypothesis could only say that the evidence pointed to a cosmic impactor of some kind, most likely a swarm of fragments from a disintegrating comet.

  In 2010, however, in a paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, William Napier added his weight and specific details to the conclusion that a comet had indeed been involved—a giant comet, perhaps 100 kilometers in diameter, according to his calculations, that entered the inner solar system on an earth-crossing orbit somewhere between 30,000 and 20,000 years ago and thereafter underwent the series of fragmentations that spawned the Taurid meteor stream.21 This is a normal process for comets22 and it’s Professor Napier’s case that intersection with the fragmenting debris of this exceptionally large comet around 12,800 years ago “provides a satisfactory explanation” for the postulated celestial origin of the Younger Dryas cataclysm.23