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Know_files/FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS.pdf - D Ank Unlimited

Know_files/FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS.pdf - D Ank Unlimited

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Graham Hancock – <strong>FINGERPRINTS</strong> <strong>OF</strong> <strong>THE</strong> <strong>GODS</strong><br />

the convulsive scale the myths so eloquently describe.<br />

3 The Ice Age and its tumultuous demise were global phenomena. It is<br />

therefore perhaps not surprising that the cataclysm traditions of many<br />

different cultures, widely scattered around the globe, should be<br />

characterized by a high degree of uniformity and convergence.<br />

4 What is surprising, however, is that the myths not only describe<br />

shared experiences but that they do so in what appears to be a shared<br />

symbolic language. The same ‘literary motifs’ keep cropping up again<br />

and again, the same stylistic ‘props’, the same recognizable<br />

characters, and the same plots.<br />

According to Professor de Santillana, this type of uniformity suggests<br />

a guiding hand at work. In Hamlet’s Mill, a seminal and original thesis<br />

on ancient myth written in collaboration with Hertha von Dechend<br />

(professor of the History of Science at Frankfurt University) he argues<br />

that:<br />

universality is in itself a test when coupled with a firm design. When something<br />

found, say, in China, turns up also in Babylonian astrological texts, then it must be<br />

assumed to be relevant if it reveals a complex of uncommon images which nobody<br />

could claim had risen independently by spontaneous generation. Take the origin<br />

of music. Orpheus and his harrowing death may be a poetic creation born in more<br />

than one instance in diverse places. But when characters who do not play the lyre<br />

but blow pipes get themselves flayed alive for various absurd reasons, and their<br />

identical end is rehearsed on several continents, then we feel we have got hold of<br />

something, for such stories cannot be linked by internal sequence. And when the<br />

Pied Piper turns up both in the German myth of Hamelin and in Mexico long<br />

before Columbus, and is linked in both places to certain attributes like the colour<br />

red, it can hardly be a coincidence ... Likewise, when one finds numbers like 108,<br />

or 9 x 13 reappearing under several multiples in the Vedas, in the temples of<br />

Angkor, in Babylon, in Heraclitus’ dark utterances, and also in the Norse Valhalla,<br />

it is not accident ... 4<br />

Connecting the great universal myths of cataclysm, is it possible that<br />

such coincidences that cannot be coincidences, and accidents that cannot<br />

be accidents, could denote the global influence of an ancient, though as<br />

yet unidentified, guiding hand? If so, could it be that same hand, during<br />

and after the last Ice Age, which drew the series of highly accurate and<br />

technically advanced world maps reviewed in Part I? And might not that<br />

same hand have left its ghostly fingerprints on another body of universal<br />

myths? those concerning the death and resurrection of gods, and great<br />

trees around which the earth and heavens turn, and whirlpools, and<br />

churns, and drills, and other similar revolving, grinding contrivances?<br />

According to Santillana and von Dechend, all such images refer to<br />

celestial events 5 and do so, furthermore, in the refined technical language<br />

of an archaic but ‘immensely sophisticated’ astronomical and<br />

mathematical science: 6 ‘This language ignores local beliefs and cults. It<br />

4 Hamlet’s Mill, p. 7.<br />

5 Ibid.; Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt.<br />

6 Hamlet’s Mill, p. 65.<br />

237

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