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Chapter 25
Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
The Many Masks of the Apocalypse
Like the Hopi Indians of North America, the Avestic Aryans of pre-Islamic
Iran believed that there were three epochs of creation prior to our own. In
the first epoch men were pure and sinless, tall and long lived, but at its
close the Evil One declared war against Ahura Mazda, the holy god, and a
tumultuous cataclysm ensued. During the second epoch the Evil One was
unsuccessful. In the third good and evil were exactly balanced. In the
fourth epoch (the present age of the world), evil triumphed at the outset
and has maintained its supremacy ever since. 1
The end of the fourth epoch is predicted soon, but it is the cataclysm at
the end of the first epoch that interests us here. It is not a flood, and yet
it converges in so many ways with so many global flood traditions that
some connection is strongly suggested.
The Avestic scriptures take us back to a time of paradise on earth, when
the remote ancestors of the ancient Iranian people lived in the fabled
Airyana Vaejo, the first good and happy creation of Ahura Mazda that
flourished in the first age of the world: the mythical birthplace and
original home of the Aryan race.
In those days Airyana Vaejo enjoyed a mild and productive climate with
seven months of summer and five of winter. Rich in wildlife and in crops,
its meadows flowing with streams, this garden of delights was converted
into an uninhabitable wasteland of ten months’ winter and only two
months summer as a result of the onslaught of Angra Mainyu, the Evil
One:
The first of the good lands and countries which I, Ahura Mazda, created was the
Airyana Vaejo ... Then Angra Mainyu, who is full of death, created an opposition to
the same, a mighty serpent and snow. Ten months of winter are there now, two
months of summer, and these are cold as to the water, cold as to the earth, cold
as to the trees ... There all around falls deep snow; that is the direst of plagues ...’ 2
The reader will agree that a sudden and drastic change in the climate of
Airyana Vaejo is indicated. The Avestic scriptures leave us in no doubt
about this. Earlier they describe a meeting of the celestial gods called by
Ahura Mazda, and tell us that ‘the fair Yima, the good shepherd of high
renown in the Airyana Vaejo’, attended this meeting with all his excellent
mortals.
1 The Bundahish Chapters I, XXXI, XXXIV, cited in William F. Warren, Paradise Found: The
Cradle of the Human Race at the North Pole, Houghton, Mifflin and Co., Boston, 1885, p.
282.
2 Vendidad, Fargard I, cited in Lokamanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak, The Arctic Home in the
Vedas, Tilak Publishers, Poona, 1956, pp. 340-1.
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