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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 />

Before me was a passage from Fr. Jose de Acosta’s Natural and Moral<br />

History of the Indies, in which the learned priest set out ‘what the Indians<br />

themselves report of their beginning’:<br />

They make great mention of a deluge, which happened in their country ... The<br />

Indians say that all men were drowned in the deluge, and they report that out of<br />

Lake Titicaca came one Viracocha, who stayed in Tiahuanaco, where at this day<br />

there are to be seen the ruins of ancient and very strange buildings, and from<br />

thence came to Cuzco, and so began mankind to multiply ... 1<br />

Making a mental note to find out more about Lake Titicaca, and the<br />

mysterious Tiahuanaco, I read the following passage summarizing a<br />

legend from the Cuzco area:<br />

For some crime unstated the people who lived in the most ancient times were<br />

destroyed by the creator ... in a deluge. After the deluge the creator appeared in<br />

human form from Lake Titicaca. He then created the sun and moon and stars.<br />

After that he renewed the human population of the earth ... 2<br />

In another myth<br />

The great Creator God, Viracocha, decided to make a world for men to live in. First<br />

he made the earth and sky. Then he began to make people to live in it, carving<br />

great stone figures of giants which he brought to life. At first all went well but<br />

after a time the giants began to fight among themselves and refused to work.<br />

Viracocha decided that he must destroy them. Some he turned back into stone ...<br />

the rest he overwhelmed with a great flood. 3<br />

Very similar notions were, of course, found in other, quite unconnected,<br />

sources, such as the Jewish Old Testament. In Chapter six of the Book of<br />

Genesis, for example, which describes the Hebrew God’s displeasure with<br />

his creation and his decision to destroy it, I had long been intrigued by<br />

one of the few descriptive statements made about the forgotten era<br />

before the Flood. According to the enigmatic language of that statement,<br />

‘There were giants in the earth in those days ...’. 4 Could the ‘giants’<br />

buried in the biblical sands of the Middle East be connected in some<br />

unseen way to the ‘giants’ woven into the fabric of pre-Colombian native<br />

American legends? Adding considerably to the mystery was the fact that<br />

the Jewish and Peruvian sources both went on, with many further details<br />

in common, to depict an angry deity unleashing a catastrophic flood upon<br />

a wicked and disobedient world.<br />

On the next page of the sheaf of documents I had assembled was this<br />

Inca account of the deluge handed down by a certain Father Molina in his<br />

Relacion de las fabulas y ritos de los Yngas:<br />

In the life of Manco Capac, who was the first Inca, and from whom they began to<br />

1<br />

José de Acosta, The Natural and Moral History of the Indies, Book I, Chapter four, in<br />

South American Mythology, p. 61.<br />

2<br />

Ibid., p. 82.<br />

3<br />

D. Gifford and J. Sibbick, Warriors, Gods and Spirits from South American Mythology,<br />

Eurobook Limited, 1983, p. 54.<br />

4<br />

Genesis 6:4.<br />

61

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