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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 />

seen to rise in a different constellation (thus if the sun rises in Pisces at<br />

the spring equinox, as it does at present, it must rise in Virgo at the<br />

autumn equinox, in Gemini at the winter solstice and in Sagittarius at the<br />

summer solstice). On each of these four occasions for the last 2000 years<br />

or so, this is exactly what the sun has been doing. As we have seen,<br />

however, precession of the equinoxes means that the vernal point will<br />

change in the not so distant future from Pisces to Aquarius. When that<br />

happens, the three other constellations marking the three key points will<br />

change as well (from Virgo, Gemini and Sagittarius to Leo, Taurus and<br />

Scorpius)—almost as though the giant mechanism of heaven has<br />

ponderously switched gears ...<br />

Like the axle of a mill, Santillana and von Dechend explain, Yggdrasil<br />

‘represents the world axis’ in the archaic scientific language they have<br />

identified: an axis which extends outwards (for a viewer in the northern<br />

hemisphere) to the North Pole of the celestial sphere:<br />

This instinctively suggests a straight, upright post ... but that would be an<br />

oversimplification. In the mythical context it is best not to think of the axis in<br />

analytical terms, one line at a time, but to consider it, and the frame to which it is<br />

connected, as a whole:... As radius automatically calls circle to mind so axis<br />

should invoke the two determining great circles on the surface of the sphere, the<br />

equinoctial and solstitial colures. 6<br />

These colures are the imaginary hoops, intersecting at the celestial North<br />

Pole, which connect the two equinoctial points on the earth’s path around<br />

the sun (i.e. where it stands on 20 March and 22 September) and the two<br />

solstitial points (where it stands on 21 June and 21 December). The<br />

implication, is that: ‘The rotation of the polar axis must not be disjointed<br />

from the great circles that shift along with it in heaven. The framework is<br />

thought of as all one with the axis.’ 7<br />

Santillana and von Dechend are certain that what confronts us here is<br />

not a belief but an allegory. They insist that the notion of a spherical<br />

frame composed of two intersecting hoops suspended from an axis is not<br />

under any circumstances to be understood as the way in which ancient<br />

science envisaged the cosmos. Instead it is to be seen as a ‘thought tool’<br />

designed to focus the minds of people bright enough to crack the code<br />

upon the hard-to-detect astronomical fact of precession of the equinoxes.<br />

It is a thought tool that keeps on cropping up, in numerous disguises,<br />

all over the myths of the ancient world.<br />

At the mill with slaves<br />

One example, from Central America (which also provides a further<br />

illustration of the curious symbolic ‘cross-overs’ between myths of<br />

6 Hamlet’s Mill, p. 232-3.<br />

7 Ibid., p. 231.<br />

242

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