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

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Chapter 52<br />

Like a Thief in the Night<br />

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

There are certain structures in the world, certain ideas, certain intellectual<br />

treasures, that are truly mysterious. I am beginning to suspect that the<br />

human race may have placed itself in grave jeopardy by failing to<br />

consider [the implications of these mysteries.<br />

We have the ability, unique in the animal kingdom, to learn from the<br />

experiences of our predecessors. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for<br />

example, two generations have grown to adulthood in awareness of the<br />

horrific destruction that nuclear weapons unleash. Our children will be<br />

aware of this too, without experiencing it directly, and they will pass it on<br />

to their children. Theoretically, therefore, the knowledge of what atom<br />

bombs do has become part of the permanent historical legacy of<br />

mankind, whether we choose to benefit from that legacy or not is up to<br />

us. Nevertheless the knowledge is there, should we wish to use it,<br />

because it has been preserved and transmitted in written records, in film<br />

archives, in allegorical paintings, in war memorials, and so on.<br />

Not all testimony from the past is accorded the same stature as the<br />

records of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On the contrary, like the Canonical<br />

Bible, the body of knowledge that we call ‘History’ is an edited cultural<br />

artefact from which much has been left out. In particular, references to<br />

human experiences prior to the invention of writing around 5000 years<br />

ago have been omitted in their entirety and myth has become a synonym<br />

for delusion.<br />

Suppose it is not delusion?<br />

Suppose that a tremendous cataclysm were to overtake the earth today,<br />

obliterating the achievements of our civilization and wiping out almost all<br />

of us. Suppose, to paraphrase Plato, that we were forced by this<br />

cataclysm ‘to begin again like children, in complete ignorance of what<br />

had happened in early times’. 1 Under such circumstances, ten or twelve<br />

thousand years from now (with all written records and film archives long<br />

since destroyed) what testimony might our descendants still preserve<br />

concerning the events at the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in<br />

August 1945 of the Christian era?<br />

It is easy to imagine how they might speak in mystical terms of<br />

explosions that gave off a ‘terrible glare of light’ and ‘immense heat’. 2<br />

Nor would we be too surprised to find that they might have formulated a<br />

‘mythical’ account something like this:<br />

1 Plato, Timaeus and Critias, Penguin Classics, 1977, p. 36.<br />

2 The Bhagavata Purana, Motilal Banardass, Delhi, 1986, Part I, pp. 59, 95.<br />

466

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