Magicians of the Gods

by Graham Hancock

  An example that has survived into the modern world is the special reverence accorded by Muslims to the sacred Black Stone built into a corner of the wall of the Ka’aba in Mecca. Touched by every pilgrim making the Haj to the holy site, this stone was declared by the Prophet Muhammad to have fallen from heaven to earth where it was first given to Adam to absorb his sins after his expulsion from the Garden of Eden; later it was presented by the angel Gabriel to Abraham, the Hebrew Patriarch; finally it became the cornerstone of the Ka’aba—the “beating heart” of the Islamic world.36

  Geologists attribute a meteoric origin to the Black Stone.37 Likewise the betyls—sacred stones—that some pre-Islamic Arab tribes carried on their desert wanderings were meteorites, and a direct line of cultural transmission is recognized linking these betyls (which were often placed in portable shrines) with the Black Stone of the Ka’aba and with the stone “tablets of the law” contained within the Ark. In Europe betyls were also known and were called lapis betilis, a name:

  stemming from Semitic origins and taken over at a late date by the Greeks and Romans for sacred stones that were assumed to possess a divine life, stones with a soul [that were used] for divers superstitions, for magic and for fortune-telling. They were meteoric stones fallen from the sky.38

  With all this in mind, the special interest of Khufu in the “thunderbolt” mentioned in the Inventory Stela takes on a new significance. As the reader will recall, the inscription speaks of the “Lord of Heaven”—an epithet for Ra-Atum—“descending” on the Sphinx and inflicting the damage that Khufu would later repair according to the ancient “plans” to which he had access. For such a thunderbolt to be merely a lightning strike, as Selim Hassan suggests, makes no sense since the Inventory Stela tells us very clearly that Khufu visited the site “in order to see the thunderbolt.”

  In short, an object that had fallen from the sky, and that could reasonably be described as the result of the Lord of Heaven “descending” on the Sphinx, must still have been physically present there. A meteorite satisfies this context but it could not, of course, have been the Benben kept at Heliopolis—for the Mansion of the Phoenix and the Benben already existed in Khufu’s time.39 The Pharaoh’s eagerness to “see the thunderbolt” does, however, testify to the special reverence that was accorded to this class of objects, and it is natural to wonder what specific event that reverence goes back to—and how far it goes back.

  Could it, for example, go back all the way to the time memorialized in the Edfu texts—the time when the island of the gods was destroyed in the cataclysmic flood caused by the assault of the “enemy serpent,” so evocatively described as the “Great Leaping One?”

  Before attempting to answer that question, let’s consider the Benben stone, and the Bennu bird with which it is associated, a little more closely.

  The flight of the Phoenix

  R.T. Rundle Clark, who made an in-depth study of the Bennu–Phoenix, reports that the Ancient Egyptians believed in a “vital essence”—Hike—that had been brought to their land:

  from a distant, magical source. The latter was “the Isle of Fire”—the place of everlasting light beyond the limits of the world, where the gods were born or revived and whence they were sent into the world. The Phoenix is the chief messenger from this inaccessible land of divinity. A Coffin Text makes the victorious soul say: “I came from the Isle of Fire, having filled my body with Hike, like that bird who [came and] filled the world with that which it had not known.”40

  So the Phoenix came from far away, Rundle Clark concludes, “bringing the message of light and life to a world wrapped in the helplessness of primeval night. Its flight is the width of the world, ‘over oceans, seas and rivers,’ to land at last in Heliopolis, the symbolic center of the earth where it will announce a new age.”41

  There is much in this summary that is evocative of the Edfu texts—the far-off island from which the gods are sent out, the return of the light after an episode of primeval darkness, and an arrival at Heliopolis where a new age is set in motion. Indeed the Phoenix might almost be said to symbolize the mission of those “gods” who fled their drowned homeland with a long-term plan to bring about the rebirth and renewal of the former world.

  But the symbolic crossovers go deeper than this and become more complex. The Phoenix, remember, is closely associated not just with light but also with fire. Thus Lactantius writing in the fourth century AD tells us that the Phoenix:

  bathes in holy waters and feeds on living spray. After a thousand years … it builds a nest as a sepulcher, supplied with various rich juices and odors. As it sits on the nest its body grows hot enough to produce flames which in turn burn the body to ashes destined to produce a milky white worm; the latter falls asleep and then forms into an egg, eventually to sprout forth as a bird from the broken shell. After taking nourishment it rolls the ashes into a ball enclosed in myrrh and frankincense, which the new-born bird transports to an altar in the city of Heliopolis.42

  This theme of fire and of regeneration and new life emerging from a fiery death, also crops up in ancient Iran where Yima built his Vara, and where the Phoenix was called the Simorgh. As folklorist E.V.A. Kenealy explains, the accounts of the Simorgh decisively establish:

  that the death and revival of the Phoenix exhibit the successive destruction and reproduction of the world, which many believed to be effected by the agency of a fiery deluge.43

  Different lengthy periods—1000 years, 500 years, 540 years, 7006 years—are given for the life of the Phoenix before it dies in fire and then renews itself.44 There is, however, a strong and very specific tradition, relayed, for example, by Solinus in the early third century AD, which sets the period of the Phoenix at what seems to be a completely arbitrary and bizarre number—12,954 years.45 But further investigation reveals that “the period of the Phoenix’s return was thought to correspond to the Great Year”46 and the “Great Year,” we already know, is an ancient concept linked to the Precession of the Equinoxes with its twelve “Great Months” (one for the sun’s passage through each house of the zodiac) of 2,160 years each—thus 12 x 2,160 = 25,920 years. That figure of 25,920 years is in turn, of course, very close to twice 12,954 years (2 x 12,954 = 25,908 years)—too close to be a coincidence, in my opinion, especially when we remember that Cicero in his Hortensius specifically linked the Great Year to the number 12,954.47

  The figure of 540 years given in other sources for the period of the Phoenix also turns out to be derived from the Great Year as Giorgo de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend demonstrated in Hamlet’s Mill, their masterly study of precessional knowledge transmitted through myth. As we saw in Chapter Ten, the heartbeat of the precessional cycle is the number 72—the number of years required for one degree of precession. We then add 36 (half of 72) to the number 72 to get 108; next we half 108 to get 54 and, finally, multiply 54 by 10 to get 540. I went into all this in great detail in Fingerprints of the Gods twenty years ago and refer the reader to that book for a full exposition of these precessional numbers,48 which are found in ancient myths and traditions from all around the world and which Santillana and von Dechend long ago demonstrated are proof of advanced astronomical knowledge in the deepest antiquity—knowledge that they attributed to some as yet unidentified and “almost unbelievable” ancestor civilization.49

  What is particularly intriguing is how often ancient authorities connect the passage of the Great Year, which we now see to be linked to the period of the Phoenix, to a “world conflagration” and a “world flood”—not necessarily as the cause of those cataclysms, but as a timer that records and predicts them. 50 Confronted by such material, despite all the oddities and contradictions it has been weighed down with during the passage of several millennia, I am forcibly reminded of the Younger Dryas comet and the conflagration and global flood that it brought in its wake—the latter caused by the catastrophic collapse of large segments of the North American and northern European ice caps as they were hit by multiple large fragmen
ts, the former caused by superheated ejecta setting off forest fires across the minimum 50 million square kilometers (19.3 million square miles) of the earth’s surface that were directly affected.

  What goes around comes around

  Suppose you wished to pass a message to the future, and not just the near future but the very distant future? You would be unwise to entrust it to writing, because you could not be certain that any civil-ization 12,000 years from now would be able to decipher your script. Besides, even if the script could be deciphered, the written document on which you had placed your message might not survive the ravages of time. If you were really determined to be understood by some distant future generation, you might therefore do better to devise your message using gigantic architectural monuments that “time itself would fear”—monuments like the pyramids and the Great Sphinx of Giza—and to associate those monuments with a universal language such as the slow precessional changes in the sky that any astronomically literate culture would be able to read.

  Ideally, also, your message should be a simple one.

  We saw in Chapter Ten how the Giza-Heliopolis-Memphis area perfectly fits the bill as one of the new sacred domains that the Edfu texts tell us were established at various locations by the wandering “companies” of gods seeking to bring about the resurrection of the former world destroyed in the flood. It is, moreover, a domain that fully justifies the description of “a book descended from the sky.” And when we “read” that book, written in the “script” of precession with the “pen” of megalithic architecture, it compels us to look at the epoch of 10,500 BC—not an exact date, because the precessional “clock” gives indications that are too general to allow us to specify “seconds” or even “minutes,” but quite definitely to the epoch of 10,500 BC, i.e. about 12,500 years ago. The same general astronomical configurations that are symbolized on the ground by the great monuments of Giza would have held true for the best part of 500 years before 10,500 BC and for about 1000 years afterward.

  In other words, as we have seen, the “message” of the monuments exactly encapsulates the cataclysmic episode of the Younger Dryas which began suddenly and shockingly with the impacts of multiple fragments of a giant comet around 10,800 BC, i.e. around 12,800 years ago, and which ended equally suddenly—we do not yet know why—around 9600 BC, i.e. around 11,600 years ago. The most likely explanation is that the earth interacted again in 9600 BC with the debris stream of the same fragmenting comet that had caused the Younger Dryas to start in 10,800 BC. On the second occasion, however, the effects of the impacts were global warming rather than global cooling.

  With comets, as with the mythical Phoenix, what goes around comes around.

  Since they are in orbit, they return to our skies at cyclic intervals—some as short at 3.3 years (like Comet Encke for example), some longer than 4,000 years (such as Comet Hale-Bopp), some even running into tens of thousands of years.

  Like the mythical Phoenix, also, comets do literally undergo a process of “renewal”—indeed “rebirth”—on each appearance in our skies. This is because comet nuclei are usually inert and utterly dark while traveling through deep space, producing no characteristic glowing “coma” and sparkling “tail.” However, as a comet approaches the sun (and thus also the earth) the solar rays cause volatile materials buried in its interior to burst into boiling, seething activity, producing jets of gas—scientists call the process “outgassing”—and shedding millions of tons of exceptionally fine dust and debris to form the coma and tail.

  Last but not least, outgassing comets, like the Phoenix, do have the appearance of being consumed in flames. Moreover, the collision of large cometary fragments with the earth itself, as the scientists studying the Younger Dryas impact event of 12,800 years ago have so graphically indicated, can be expected to result in conflagrations on a continent-wide scale followed, if impacts occur on ice sheets, by global flooding.

  It is possible, indeed highly probable, that we are not yet done with the comet that changed the face of the earth between 10,800 BC and 9600 BC. To be quite clear, as we will see in Chapter Nineteen, some suspect that “the return of the Phoenix” will take place in our own time—indeed by or before the year 2040—and there is a danger that one of the objects in its debris stream may be as much as 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) in diameter. A collision with such a large cometary fragment would, at the very least, mean the end of civilization as we know it, and perhaps even the end of all human life on this planet. Its consequences would be orders of magnitude more devastating than the Younger Dryas impacts 12,800 years ago that left us as a species with amnesia, obliged to begin again like children with no memory of what went before.

  Or rather with almost no memory.

  Because in our beginning again it seems we had the guidance, the leadership, the teachings, and the high wisdom of “the Sages,” “the Shining Ones”—those “Magicians of the Gods”—who had survived from antediluvian times and whose mission was to ensure that all was not after all lost. It doesn’t make sense that they would have gone to such great lengths to spell out the epoch of 10,500 BC at Giza just to say they were there. I suggest the science of their civilization was high enough for them to have understood exactly what had happened to the world and to predict when it would happen again.

  I think, in short, that their purpose may have been to send us a message.

  We will look more deeply into that message, and its implications, in later chapters, but first there is another trail of clues to follow, a trail that may lead us closer to the “Magicians” and their “magic.”

  Part V

  Stones

  Chapter 12

  Baalbek

  We land at Beirut’s International Airport in the late evening of July 9, 2014. The airport is named after former Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, who was assassinated on February 14, 2005 when his motorcade drove past a Mitsubishi van parked outside the Saint George Hotel on the city’s fashionable Mediterranean seafront—known as the Corniche. The van contained a young male suicide bomber (or so the very fragmentary DNA evidence suggests) and an estimated 1,800 kilos (about 4,000 pounds) of TNT. Twenty-three people, among them Hariri, several of his bodyguards, and his close friend and former Minister of the Economy Bassel Fleihan, were killed. Those suspected of organizing the massacre include senior members of Hezbollah, the Shia militant and political group that controls the town of Baalbek in the Bekaa Valley, where there are certain intriguing ancient ruins that I’m determined to see on this research visit to Lebanon. Hezbollah itself blames Israel. In addition, some suspect that President Bashar al-Assad of Syria was directly involved.1

  The Syrian border runs along the eastern edge of the Bekaa Valley and very close to Baalbek itself, which was hit by missiles in June 2013 and where there are repeated violent incidents.2 With the horrendous Syrian civil war still in full swing, and huge numbers of refugees adding to the general state of chaos and instability, we’ve been advised to stay away. But I’ve wanted to see Baalbek for years and I feel all the more strongly drawn to the ruins there after what I’ve learned researching Ancient Egypt.

  Figure 41: Lebanon in its regional context.

  There are, you see, a number of puzzling connections and I have these very much in mind, having been re-reading my notes on the flight, as Santha and I step down out of the plane onto the tarmac and make our way into the terminal building. The night air is warm but a refreshing breeze blows in off the Mediterranean, and I find myself looking forward to whatever adventures lie ahead.

  Our first encounter is with bureaucracy in the form of an immigration officer wearing a gray uniform over an open-necked shirt. He is young but he has a sallow, unhealthy complexion and an unshaved, suspicious look about him. Indeed, he is extremely suspicious, as he makes clear each time he glances up from my passport to glare at me before returning to his forensic examination of the pages. My passport contains 41 pages with space for visas and I travel frequently, so there are stamps from all o
ver the world—Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia, South Africa, India, the United States, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Canada, Turkey … The young officer studies each stamp minutely, slowly leafing through the pages from front to back, glaring at me, returning to the investigation, glaring at me again. Then when he has reached the very last page, he repeats the procedure, this time leafing through from back to front.

  I know what he’s looking for—a visa stamp for Israel, the presence of which will allow him to deny me entry. He won’t find one. Although my research has taken me to Israel several times, I’m always careful to get the entrance and exit stamps on a loose sheet of paper placed inside my passport, rather than on the passport itself. Besides, my last visit was in 1999 and I’ve changed my passport twice since then, so there’s nothing to be in the least bit concerned about. Even so, I have to admit I feel uncomfortable at this intense, sustained scrutiny.

  After going through the passport a third time, the officer gives me another hostile glare and asks: “Why you come to our country?”

  “Tourist,” I reply. I know from long experience that saying anything about researching a book can lead to all manner of additional problems and suspicions that are best avoided.

  He raises a skeptical eyebrow. “Tourist?”

  “Yes. Tourist.”

  “And you see what, in our country?”

  I’m ready for the question. “Beirut. The beautiful Corniche. I’ve heard there are some great restaurants. Then we’re going to Byblos and of course to Baalbek.”

  The eyebrow shoots up again. “Baalbek?”

  “Yes, of course! Wouldn’t miss it for anything.” This at least is true. “The temples. The big stones. I’ve heard it’s one of the wonders of the world.”

  Suddenly a smile. “Wonderful, yes! I am from Baalbek. My home town.” He stamps my passport with a flourish and scrawls something in handwriting over the visa. “Welcome to Lebanon,” he says.