Fingerprints of the Gods

360 mortal years.27

  The Kali Yuga, therefore, at 1200 years of the gods, turns out to have a

  duration of 432,000 mortal years.28 One Mahayuga, or Great Age (made

  up of the 12,000 divine years contained in the four lesser Yugas) is

  equivalent to 4,320,000 years of mortals. A thousand such Mahayugas

  (which constitute a Kalpa, or Day of Brahma) extend over 4,320,000,000

  24 For fuller details see The Hung League and J. S. M. Ward, The Hung Society, Baskerville

  Press, London, 1925 (in three volumes).

  25 W. J. Wilkins, Hindu Mythology: Vedic and Puranic, Heritage Publishers, New Delhi,

  1991, p. 353.

  26 Ibid.

  27 Ibid.

  28 Ibid.

  257

  Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

  ordinary years,29 again supplying the digits for basic precessional

  calculations. Separately there are Manvantaras (periods of Manu) of which

  we are told in the scriptures that ‘about 71 systems of four Yugas elapse

  during each Manvantara.’30 The reader will recall that one degree of

  precessional motion along the ecliptic requires 71.6 years to complete, a

  number that can be rounded down to ‘about 71’ in India just as easily as

  it was rounded up to 72 in Ancient Egypt.

  The Kali Yuga, with a duration of 432,000 mortal years, is, by the way,

  our own. ‘In the Kali Age,’ the scriptures say, ‘shall decay flourish, until

  the human race approaches annihilation.’31

  Dogs, uncles and revenge

  It was a dog that brought us to these decaying times.

  We came here by way of Sirius, the Dog Star, who stands at the heel of

  the giant constellation of Orion where it towers in the sky above Egypt. In

  that land, as we have seen, Orion is Osiris, the god of death and

  resurrection, whose numbers—perhaps by chance—are 12, 30, 72, and

  360. But can chance account for the fact that these and other prime

  integers of precession keep cropping up in supposedly unrelated

  mythologies from all over the world, and in such stolid but enduring

  vehicles as calendar systems and works of architecture?

  Santillana and von Dechend, Jane Sellers and a growing body of other

  scholars rule out chance, arguing that the persistence of detail is

  indicative of a guiding hand.

  If they are wrong, we need to find some other explanation for how such

  specific and inter-related numbers (the only obvious function of which is

  to calculate precession) could by accident have got themselves so widely

  imprinted on human culture.

  But suppose they are not wrong? Suppose that a guiding hand really

  was at work behind the scenes?

  Sometimes, when you slip into Santillana’s and von Dechend’s world of

  myth and mystery, you can almost feel the influence of that hand ... Take

  the business of the dog ... or jackal, or wolf, or fox. The subtle way this

  shadowy canine slinks from myth to myth is peculiar—stimulating, then

  baffling you, always luring you onwards.

  Indeed, it was this lure we followed from the Mill of Amlodhi to the

  myth of Osiris in Egypt. Along the way, according to the design of the

  ancient sages (if Sellers, Santillana and von Dechend are right) we were

  first encouraged to build a clear mental picture of the celestial sphere.

  Second, we were provided with a mechanistic model so that we could

  29 Ibid., pp. 353-4.

  30 Ibid., p. 354.

  31 Ibid., p. 247.

  258

  Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

  visualize the great changes precession of the equinoxes periodically

  effects in all the coordinates of the sphere. Finally, after allowing the dog

  Sirius to open the way for us, we were given the figures to calculate

  precession more or less exactly.

  Nor is Sirius, in his eternal station at Orion’s heel, the only doggish

  character around Osiris. We saw in Chapter Eleven how Isis (who was both

  the wife and sister of Osiris32) searched for her dead husband’s body after

  he had been murdered by Set (who, incidentally, was also her brother,

  and the brother of Osiris). In this search, according to ancient tradition,

  she was assisted by dogs (jackals in some versions).33 Likewise,

  mythological and religious texts from all periods of Egyptian history

  assert that the jackal-god Anubis ministered to the spirit of Osiris after

  his death and acted as his guide through the underworld.34 (Surviving

  vignettes depict Anubis as virtually identical in appearance to Upuaut, the

  Opener of the Ways.)

  Last but not least, Osiris himself was believed to have taken the form of

  a wolf when he returned from the underworld to assist his son Horus in

  the final battle against Set.35

  Investigating this kind of material, one sometimes has the spooky sense

  of being manipulated by an ancient intelligence which has found a way to

  reach out to us across vast epochs of time, and for some reason has set

  us a puzzle to solve in the language of myth.

  If it were just dogs that kept cropping up again and again, it would be

  easy to brush off such weird intuitions. The dog phenomenon seems

  more likely to be coincidence than anything else. But it isn’t just dogs.

  The ways between the two very different myths of Osiris and Amlodhi’s

  Mill (which nonetheless both seem to contain accurate scientific data

  about precession of the equinoxes) are kept open by another strange

  common factor. Family relationships are involved.

  Amlodhi/Amleth/Hamlet is always a son who revenges the murder of his

  father by entrapping and killing the murderer. The murderer,

  furthermore, is always the father’s own brother, i.e., Hamlet’s uncle.36

  This is precisely the scenario of the Osiris myth. Osiris and Seth are

  brothers.37 Seth murders Osiris. Horus, the son of Osiris, then takes

  revenge upon his uncle.38

  Another twist is that the Hamlet character often has some sort of

  incestuous relationship with his sister.39 In the case of Kullervo, the

  32 For details of these complicated family relationships, see Egyptian Book of the Dead,

  Introduction, p. XLVIIIff.

  33 The Gods of the Egyptians, volume II, p. 366.

  34 The Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 71.

  35 Gods of the Egyptians, II, p. 367.

  36 Hamlet’s Mill, p. 2.

  37 Egyptian Book of the Dead, Introduction, p. XLIX-LI.

  38 Ibid.

  39 Hamlet’s Mill, pp. 32-4.

  259

  Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

  Finnish Hamlet, there is a poignant scene in which the hero, returning

  home after a long absence, meets a maiden in the woods, gathering

  berries. They lie together. Only later do they discover that they are

  brother and sister. The maiden drowns herself at once. Later, with ‘the

  black dog Musti’ padding along at his heels, Kullervo wanders into the

  forest and throws himself upon his sword.40

  There are no suicides in the Egyptian myth of Osiris, but there is the

  incest of Osiris and his sister Isis. Out of their union is born Horus the

  avenger.

  So once again it seems reasonable to ask: what is going on? Why are

  there all these apparent l
inks and connections? Why do we have these

  ‘strings’ of myths, ostensibly about different subjects, all of which prove

  capable in their own ways of shedding light on the phenomenon of

  precession of the equinoxes? And why do all these myths have dogs

  running through them, and characters who seem unusually inclined to

  incest, fratricide and revenge? It surely drives scepticism beyond its limits

  to suggest that so many identical literary devices could keep on turning

  up purely by chance in so many different contexts.

  If not by chance, however, then who exactly was responsible for

  creating this intricate and clever connecting pattern? Who were the

  authors and designers of the puzzle and what motives might they have

  had?

  Scientists with something to say

  Whoever it was, they must have been smart—smart enough to have

  observed the infinitesimal creep of precessional motion along the ecliptic

  and to have calculated its rate at a value uncannily close to that obtained

  by today’s advanced technology.

  It therefore follows that we are talking about highly civilized people.

  Indeed, we are talking about people who deserve to be called scientists.

  They must, moreover, have lived in extremely remote antiquity because

  we can be certain that the creation and dissemination of the common

  heritage of precessional myths on both sides of the Atlantic did not take

  place in historic times. On the contrary the evidence suggests that all

  these myths were ‘tottering with age’ when what we call history began

  about 5000 years ago.41

  The great strength of the ancient stories was this: as well as being for

  ever available for use and adaptation free of copyright, like intellectual

  chameleons, subtle and ambiguous, they had the capacity to change their

  colour according to their surroundings. At different times, in different

  continents, the ancient tales could be retold in a variety of ways, but

  40 Ibid., p. 33.

  41 Ibid., p. 119.

  260

  Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

  would always retain their essential symbolism and always continue to

  transmit the coded precessional data they had been programmed with at

  the outset.

  But to what end?

  As we see in the next chapter, the long slow cycles of precession are

  not limited in their consequences to a changing view of the sky. This

  celestial phenomenon, born of the earth’s axial wobble, has direct effects

  on the earth itself. In fact, it appears to be one of the principal correlates

  of the sudden onset of ice ages and their equally sudden and catastrophic

  decay.

  261

  Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

  Chapter 32

  Speaking to the Unborn

  It is understandable that a huge range of myths from all over the ancient

  world should describe geological catastrophes in graphic detail. Mankind

  survived the horror of the last Ice Age, and the most plausible source for

  our enduring traditions of flooding and freezing, massive volcanism and

  devastating earthquakes is in the tumultuous upheavals unleashed during

  the great meltdown of 15,000 to 8000 BC. The final retreat of the ice

  sheets, and the consequent 300-400 foot rise in global sea levels, took

  place only a few thousand years before the beginning of the historical

  period. It is therefore not surprising that all our early civilizations should

  have retained vivid memories of the vast cataclysms that had terrified

  their forefathers.

  Much harder to explain is the peculiar but distinctive way the myths of

  cataclysm seem to bear the intelligent imprint of a guiding hand.1 Indeed

  the degree of convergence between such ancient stories is frequently

  remarkable enough to raise the suspicion that they must all have been

  ‘written’ by the same ‘author’.

  Could that author have had anything to do with the wondrous deity, or

  superhuman, spoken of in so many of the myths we have reviewed, who

  appears immediately after the world has been shattered by a horrifying

  geological catastrophe and brings comfort and the gifts of civilization to

  the shocked and demoralized survivors?

  White and bearded, Osiris is the Egyptian manifestation of this universal

  figure, and it may not be an accident that one of the first acts he is

  remembered for in myth is the abolition of cannibalism among the

  primitive inhabitants of the Nile Valley.2 Viracocha, in South America, was

  said to have begun his civilizing mission immediately after a great flood;

  Quetzalcoatl, the discoverer of maize, brought the benefits of crops,

  mathematics, astronomy and a refined culture to Mexico after the Fourth

  Sun had been overwhelmed by a destroying deluge.

  Could these strange myths contain a record of encounters between

  scattered palaeolithic tribes which survived the last Ice Age and an as yet

  1 See Chapter Twenty-four for details of flood myths. The same kind of convergence

  among supposedly unconnected myths also occurs with regard to precession of the

  equinoxes. The mills, the characters who work and own and eventually break them, the

  brothers and nephews and uncles, the theme of revenge, the theme of incest, the dogs

  that flit silently from story to story, and the exact numbers needed to calculate

  precessional motion—all crop up everywhere, from culture to culture and from age to

  age, propagating themselves effortlessly along the jet-stream of time.

  2 Diodorus Siculus, Book I, 14:1-15, translated by C. H. Oldfather, Loeb Classical Library,

  London, 1989, pp. 47-9.

  262

  Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

  unidentified high civilization which passed through the same epoch?

  And could the myths be attempts to communicate?

  A message in the bottle of time

  ‘Of all the other stupendous inventions,’ Galileo once remarked,

  what sublimity of mind must have been his who conceived how to communicate

  his most secret thoughts to any other person, though very distant either in time or

  place, speaking with those who are in the Indies, speaking to those who are not

  yet born, nor shall be this thousand or ten thousand years? And with no greater

  difficulty than the various arrangements of two dozen little signs on paper? Let

  this be the seal of all the admirable inventions of men.3

  If the ‘precessional message’ identified by scholars like Santillana, von

  Dechend and Jane Sellers is indeed a deliberate attempt at

  communication by some lost civilization of antiquity, how come it wasn’t

  just written down and left for us to find? Wouldn’t that have been easier

  than encoding it in myths? Perhaps.

  Nevertheless, suppose that whatever the message was written on got

  destroyed or worn away after many thousands of years? Or suppose that

  the language in which it was inscribed was later forgotten utterly (like the

  enigmatic Indus Valley script, which has been studied closely for more

  than half a century but has so far resisted all attempts at decoding)? It

  must be obvious that in such circumstances a written legacy to the future

  would be of no valu
e at all, because nobody would be able to make sense

  of it.

  What one would look for, therefore, would be a universal language, the

  kind of language that would be comprehensible to any technologically

  advanced society in any epoch, even a thousand or ten thousand years

  into the future. Such languages are few and far between, but mathematics

  is one of them—and the city of Teotihuacan may be the calling-card of a

  lost civilization written in the eternal language of mathematics.

  Geodetic data, related to the exact positioning of fixed geographical

  points and to the shape and size of the earth, would also remain valid

  and recognizable for tens of thousands of years, and might be most

  conveniently expressed by means of cartography (or in the construction

  of giant geodetic monuments like the Great Pyramid of Egypt, as we shall

  see).

  Another ‘constant’ in our solar system is the language of time: the

  great but regular intervals of time calibrated by the inch-worm creep of

  precessional motion. Now, or ten thousand years in the future, a message

  that prints out numbers like 72 or 2160 or 4320 or 25,920 should be

  instantly intelligible to any civilization that has evolved a modest talent

  for mathematics and the ability to detect and measure the almost

  3 Galileo, cited in Hamlet’s Mill, p. 10.

  263

  Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

  imperceptible reverse motion that the sun appears to make along the

  ecliptic against the background of the fixed stars (one degree in 71.6

  years, 30 degrees in 2148 years, and so on).

  The sense that a correlation exists is strengthened by something else. It

  is neither as firm nor as definite as the number of syllables in the

  Rigveda; nevertheless, it feels relevant. Through powerful stylistic links

  and shared symbolism, myths to do with global cataclysms and with

  precession of the equinoxes quite frequently intermesh. A detailed

  interconnectedness exists between these two categories of tradition, both

  of which additionally bear what appear to be the recognizable

  fingerprints of a conscious design. Quite naturally, therefore, one is

  prompted to discover whether there might not be an important

  connection between precession of the equinoxes and global

  catastrophes.

  Mill of pain

  Although several different mechanisms of an astronomical and geological