Magicians of the Gods

by Graham Hancock

  If ever a society could be said to meet all the mythological criteria of the next lost civilization—a society that ticks all the boxes—is it not obvious that it is our own? Our pollution and neglect of the majestic garden of the earth, our rape of its resources, our abuse of the oceans and the rainforests, our fear, hatred and suspicion of one another multiplied by a hundred bitter regional and sectarian conflicts, our consistent track record of standing by and doing nothing while millions suffer, our ignorant, narrow-minded racism, our exclusivist religions, our forgetfulness that we are all brothers and sisters, our bellicose chauvinism, the dreadful cruelties that we indulge in, in the name of nation, or faith, or simple greed, our obsessive, competitive, ego-driven production and consumption of material goods and the growing conviction of many, fueled by the triumphs of materialist science, that matter is all there is—that there is no such thing as spirit, that we are just accidents of chemistry and biology—all these things, and many more, in mythological terms at least, do not look good for us.

  Meanwhile, we have made ourselves the possessors of a technology so advanced that it seems almost like magic, even while we use it constantly in our daily lives. Computer science, the internet, aviation, television, telecommunications, space exploration, genetic engineering, nuclear weapons, nanotechnology, transplant surgery … The list goes on and on, yet very few of us are able to understand how more than a tiny fraction of it works, and as it proliferates the human spirit withers and we engage in “all manner of reckless crimes, wars and robberies and frauds, and all things hostile to the nature of the soul.”2

  Suppose for a moment that a cataclysm besets us, a cataclysm so vast that our complex, networked, highly specialized technological civilization collapses—collapses utterly beyond any hope of redemption. If such a scenario were to unfold it is likely that the meekest and most marginalized of the peoples who inhabit our world today—the hunter-gatherers of the Amazon jungle and the Kalahari desert, for example, who are used to making do with very little and whose survival skills are exemplary—would be the very ones most likely to make it through and therefore carry on the story of humanity in post-cataclysmic times.

  How would their descendants remember us a thousand or ten thousand years from now? How, for example, might something that we regard as routine, like our ability to receive 24-hour rolling television news and hear sound and view images from all parts of the world, and even from outer space, be recollected in myth and tradition? Might it not be said wonderingly of us, as it was of “the Forefathers” recalled in the Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the ancient Quiche Maya:

  They were endowed with intelligence; they saw and instantly they could see far, they succeeded in seeing, they succeeded in knowing all that there is in the world. When they looked, instantly they saw all around them, and they contemplated in turn the arch of heaven and the round face of the earth. The things hidden in the distance they saw all without first having to move; at once they saw the world, and so, too, from where they were, they saw it. Great was their wisdom; their sight reached to the forests, the lakes, the seas, the mountains and the valleys.3

  Yet, in common with so many other memories that seem to hark back to an advanced lost civilization of prehistoric antiquity, we learn that in due course the “Forefathers” became arrogant and proud and overstepped their bounds so that the gods asked: “Must they perchance be the equals of ourselves, their Makers? Let us check a little their desires, because it is not well what we see.”4 Punishment swiftly followed:

  The Heart of Heaven blew mist into their eyes, which clouded their sight as when a mirror is breathed on. Their eyes were covered and they could see only what was close, only that was clear to them. In this way all the wisdom and all the knowledge of [the Forefathers] were destroyed.5

  It is interesting to note the mechanisms used by the gods to keep our ancestors in their place, as described in the Popol Vuh:

  A flood was brought about by the Heart of Heaven … A heavy resin fell from the sky … The face of the earth was darkened and a black rain began to fall by day and by night …6 The faces of the sun and the moon were covered …7 There was much hail, black rain and mist and indescribable cold …8

  All these phenomena very accurately reflect the complex nature of the cataclysm that afflicted the earth 12,800 years ago at the beginning of the Younger Dryas cold epoch when, as we saw from the mass of evidence presented in Part II, many scientists are now certain that the earth was struck by several large fragments of a disintegrating giant comet.

  It is my opinion, indeed it is the reason I have written this book, that we need to pay attention to such accounts, and the universal details that unite them, whether they come down to us from Mexico, from Peru, from Easter Island, from Mesopotamia, from Ancient Egypt, from ancient Canaan or from Turkey. It is intriguing, for example, against the background of flood and cataclysm it describes, that the Popol Vuh makes mention of “fish-men,”9 exactly like the Apkallu Sages of Mesopotamia (“who had the whole body of a fish, but underneath and attached to the head of the fish there was another head, human, and joined to the tail of the fish, feet like those of a man”).10 Exactly like the Apkallu, too, these fish men reported in the traditions of the ancient Maya possessed magical powers and “worked many miracles.”11

  It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, the civilization bringer who appears in the Popol Vuh under the name of Gucumatz,12 should be represented, as we saw in Chapter One, by an ancient image from La Venta on the Gulf of Mexico in which he holds the exact same sort of bag or bucket that the Apkallu hold in the Mesopotamian reliefs and that is also figured on Pillar 43 at Göbekli Tepe in Turkey. La Venta was one of the centers of the mysterious early civilization of the Olmecs, who left behind sculptures of bearded men with features that do not look at all like those of native Americans, but resemble the bearded figures shown in the Mesopotamian Apkallu reliefs and in the statues of Kon-Tiki Viracocha at Tiahuanaco in Bolivia—again hinting at universal symbolism associated with a group of individuals who sought to disseminate the gifts of civilization all around the world. Moreover, it is widely recognized that the extraordinary astronomical science for which the Maya are famed was part of a wider body of advanced knowledge that had been passed down to them by the Olmecs and that the Mayan calendar itself is probably best understood as one of these Olmec legacies.

  As we saw in Chapter Fifteen, a great cycle of the Mayan calendar came to an end on 21 December 2012. It is an end date that was calculated to mark the once-in-26,000-year conjunction of the winter solstice sun and the center of the Milky Way galaxy—a conjunction that is itself, because of the diameter of the sun and the limitations of naked-eye astronomy, not so much a precise moment in time as a window 80 years wide spanning the period 1960–2040. We saw, too, how Pillar 43 at Göbekli Tepe uses solar and constellation symbolism to depict the exact same window through which, as any astronomical software program will confirm, the winter solstice sun is still transiting today.

  My intuition is that these devices, both the Mayan calendar and the Göbekli Tepe pillar, are an attempt, using the precessional code, to send a message to the future. I see the lineaments of that message also in the huge astronomical geoglyph formed by the Pyramids and the Great Sphinx of Giza. Using the same code, and their relationship to the constellations of Orion and Leo, these monuments draw our attention to the epoch of the Younger Dryas between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago and, through the symbolism of the return of the Phoenix, to the epoch that falls half a precessional cycle later, i.e. once again our own epoch (see Chapter Eleven).

  The targeting here is not so precise as that afforded by the Göbekli Tepe pillar and the Mayan calendar, but then neither is the science by which the impacts that set off the Younger Dryas are dated to 12,800 years ago. The resolution of the carbon-14 evidence upon which scientists base this chronology means that a tolerance of plus or minus 150 years must be allowed. In other words, the Youn
ger Dryas comet—let us, for convenience, refer to it as “the Phoenix”—could have struck the earth as late as 12,650 years ago (i.e. in 10,635 BC, since I am writing in AD 2015) or as early as 12,950 years ago (i.e. in 10,935 BC).

  Bearing in mind that half a precessional cycle is 12,960 years (or 12,954 years in the peculiarly exact calculations of the return of the Phoenix reported by Solinus13), we are therefore being invited to consider a period that begins in just ten years from the time of writing, i.e. around AD 2025, and that cannot be considered to have passed safely until AD 2325—i.e. until the full 12,960 years have elapsed after the latest possible date for “the Phoenix” impacts. The Mayan calendar and Pillar 43 at Göbekli Tepe, however, refine the calculation, as we’ve seen. If I understand the message correctly, we’re in the danger zone now and will be until 2040. I’m reminded of the Ojibwa tradition cited in Chapter Three:

  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.

  The comet burned everything to the ground. There wasn’t a thing left. Indian people were here before that happened, living on the earth. But things were wrong; 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.

  Things were wrong with nature on the earth … Then that comet went through here. It had a long, wide tail and it burned up everything. It flew so low the tail scorched the earth … The comet made a different world. After that survival was hard work. The weather was colder than before …14

  Does it sound like scaremongering to suggest that the comet remembered in this, and in so many other myths and traditions from all parts of the globe, might be about to stage its “Great Return”?

  Am I reading too much into recondite ancient monuments and calendars and into the fact that everywhere, universally, across all cultures, comets have always been regarded with fear and loathing and as omens of impending doom and destruction?15

  I’m not sure what the right answer to these questions is. From a personal point of view, as a loving father and grandfather, I would greatly prefer it if there was no such danger, yet at the same time, if there is danger, we would be foolish to bury our heads in the sand and pretend that there’s nothing to worry about and no action we need to take. I’m therefore obliged to point out that the most recent science on this subject is in complete agreement with the ancient wisdom.

  There is danger.

  The house of history is built on sand

  We are in the midst of a profound paradigm shift regarding how we view the evolution of human civilization. As noted at the end of Chapter Five, archaeologists have been in the habit of regarding cosmic impacts, supposedly only occurring at multi-million year intervals, as largely irrelevant to the 200,000-year story of anatomically modern humans. When we believed that the last big impact had been the dinosaur-killing asteroid of 65 million years ago, there was obviously little point in trying to relate cosmic accidents on such an almost unimaginable scale in any way to the much shorter time-frame of “history.” But the nightmare scenario raised by the group of scientists behind the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, and supported by the mass of compelling evidence reviewed in Part II—namely that a huge, earthshaking, extinction-level event occurred just 12,800 years ago, in our historical backyard—changes everything …

  First and foremost, it means the historical timeline taught as “fact” in all our schools and institutions of higher learning, the slow painful steps from Palaeolithic to Neolithic, the development of agriculture, the rise of the first cities, and so on and so forth—in short, all the conclusions archaeology has come to about the origins of civilization—rest on false foundations. For by what word other than “false” can the underpinnings of the existing historical paradigm be described, when we now know that they were put in place without taking account of the single biggest cataclysm to hit the earth since the extinction of the dinosaurs? This cataclysm, moreover, unfolded in a very specific and very recent period, the Younger Dryas between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago, and was immediately followed by the first signs of the emergence of civilization at Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, and soon afterward at many other points around the globe.

  To recognize, as archaeologists now do, that these early experiments in civilized living all took place right after the Younger Dryas “punctuation mark,” yet to take no account of the massive worldwide trauma and destruction unleashed by the cosmic impacts that caused the Younger Dryas, is a real lapse of scholarship. What is worse, however, is the parallel failure to devote even a moment’s consideration to the possibility that crucial chapters of the human story—perhaps even a great civilization of prehistoric antiquity—might have been erased from the historical record by those impacts and by the floods, the black bituminous rain, the time of darkness and the indescribable cold that followed.

  If our own civilization were to pass through a comparable cascade of giant impacts would we survive?

  All the indications are that we would not and this is why, in my view, the growing recognition of the reality of the Younger Dryas comet lays a duty upon archaeologists to desist—at the very least—from pouring further scorn upon “Atlantis,” and other rumors of a lost Ice Age civilization that have come down to us from the past. Rather than doing everything in their power to dismiss, minimize and ridicule the myths, the anomalous monuments, and the other tantalizing hints, traces and clues of a great forgotten episode of human history, the evidence of the comet impacts 12,800 years ago requires that a thorough investigation of these mysteries, drawing on the full resources of science, should be undertaken for the first time.

  Agenda?

  Great resistance will have to be overcome before such an investigation can be mounted—and for the same reasons that James Kennett, Allen West, Richard Firestone and the other leading researchers of the Younger Dryas impacts have faced resistance from their gradualist, “uniformitarian” colleagues. As Kennett has observed, the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis challenges existing paradigms across a broad range of disciplines—not just archaeology, but also paleontology, paleoceanography, paleoclimatology and impact dynamics.16

  Inevitably when one presents new evidence that treads on so many different toes, there is going to be opposition. Academic turf wars, however, are one thing; keeping us all in the dark about a real and present danger that threatens the human future, simply because recognizing the existence of that danger requires some scholars to abandon long-cherished positions, is quite another.

  Yet this is precisely what seems to be involved in the ideological attacks, masquerading as genuine criticism, that have been made on the work of Kennett, West, Firestone and others—attacks, as we saw in Part II, that they have repeatedly and amply refuted, but that can be expected to continue so long as myopic territorialism prevails in science over the rational appraisal of disturbing and, in the case of the Younger Dryas comet, utterly convincing new evidence.

  And there may be more to this than just an academic turf war—indeed something that much more closely resembles a conspiracy to hide unpalatable truths. As I was researching Magicians of the Gods, I exchanged a number of emails with Allen West, since I wanted to check facts and he’s the team member listed as the corresponding author on most of the academic papers about the Younger Dryas impact. Our discussions became quite wide-ranging and at one point he wrote:

  I think your new book will open up the comet hypothesis to a much larger audience and that is very good for our planet, because this impact topic is not just interesting past history. The Younger Dryas impact was devastating, but much smaller ones could devastate a city, region, or country today, and they are much more frequent than publicly admitted by NASA and the ESA [European Space Agency], though there seems to be growing awareness.17

 
Picking up on this issue of the apparently deliberate suppression of information about impacts, and about the Younger Dryas impacts in particular, I emailed West as follows:

  Having seen the shoddy way catastrophist ideas have been treated again and again down the years, I suppose I should not be surprised by the concerted hostility of your critics, how they spin things, and their constant crowing about the latest “requiem” for the comet theory—which turns out to be not a requiem at all but just propaganda basically! But still, I can’t help feeling there is something odd about the way your critics seem almost deliberately to ignore crucial evidence that you have presented in order to generate headlines like “study casts doubt on mammoth-killing impact” or to say things like “for the Syria site the impact theory is out,” when it isn’t “out” at all!

  Is it just that they desperately want the world to be a safe, predictable place and seek to fulfill their own wish by fudging the facts in their papers? Or is there some other agenda at work?18

  West’s reply was intriguing:

  That certainly is one aspect. One critic complained to me that “Well, if you are right, we will have to rewrite the textbooks!” As if that were a bad thing … [But], curiously, some of our most virulent critics are associated with NASA and the government. A NASA employee tells me that this attitude of opposition to impact threats is entrenched in NASA and is only now slowly beginning to change. When it became obvious to NASA decades ago that asteroids and comets are a serious threat, their employees were instructed by top government officials to downplay the risk. The government was concerned that the populace would “panic” over space rocks and demand action, when NASA couldn’t do anything about them and didn’t want to admit it. Plus, trying to mitigate any impact hazards would have used up funding they wanted to put elsewhere.19

  The dark traveler

  As long ago as 1990, before any of the physical, geological evidence for the Younger Dryas comet impacts had been discovered, astrophysicist Victor Clube and astronomer Bill Napier warned of the view: